A Victim of the Aurora (12 page)

I can imagine, though, how Norman's hopes would have irked Victor. He could tell the boy-mechanic how a true professional makes money on the side! The words in which Norman Coote now reported Victor's proposals had the Henneker flavour to them.

Victor began in the gutter press, said Victor (said Norman and, now, say I). He never lost sight of how much you could earn from that source. He discovered the scandalous associations of many famous people, partly through his contacts in Parliament and the services, partly through the efforts of an enquiry agent who pursued and spied on the famous for him. Albert Dawe was the agent's name; he kept big offices in Tottenham Court Road. And why not big offices, since Victor could make a few thousand out of a good scandal just by selling it anonymously, and Albert Dawe got 20 per cent and considered himself a literary collaborator?

Because the expedition was bound to become a
fabulous enterprise
(this was, according to Norman's memory of a conversation now four months old, Victor's phrase), he had employed Mr Dawe to look into the lives of the expeditionary officers. It wasn't an expensive commission, said Victor. Dawe took a day or so to discover of any London resident more than was known by the man's wife or mother. With country-dwellers like Alec Dryden, it took as much as two days, and since country work was harder and more wide-ranging, he often left the more mechanical London enquiries to his senior staff.

Listening to Norman's Victor-recital, I began to cough, choking on spittle as I wondered if Albert Dawe's professional expertise had been applied to the days of cyclical love-making and wine-sipping I had enjoyed with Lady Hurley in Norfolk.

They look like a garden of roses, Victor had said. Our young colleagues, the flowers of youth. (He strove for all the clichés which ten years later would show up on war memorials.) You'd be surprised, he said. He mentioned a few names. Once the expedition was over and we were all hallowed figures, he could sell us singly or by the brace or set to the right editors.

Norman, to his credit, asked Victor how he could consider letting this sort of information out about his colleagues. You don't understand journalism, said Victor, or the popular mind. It was all very well to give the masses heroes, he said, the masses wanted them. But you've got to remember the masses also
didn't
want them. They wanted to find out that men as ordinary and squalid as themselves could participate in polar heroism, they wanted to have the heroism rendered normal by reading in the gutter press that in some aspects great men were mean or grasping or lustful. People in authority didn't believe such stories, but the clerk from Vauxhall who was never going to do anything heroic, he was titillated and enthralled by scandalous stories of heroes and didn't think any the worse of the individual hero.

‘I asked him,' Norman told us, ‘if he had some sort of dossier on all of us. He said, not you. But even what I'd said to him – about Sir Gavin and the tractors – that could be made into the right kind of story. Of course,' he added, ‘it lacks the element of … of adultery and such like.' He coughed. ‘He mentioned the Leader's wife,' he said under his breath.

‘What?'

Norman's teeth bit tighter still, as if he'd set himself a ventriloquist's task. ‘He mentioned Lady Stewart. No details. But he mentioned her. She was one of his better assets.'

Playing strenuously with his pipe and all the varied objects on his desk, Alec gave Norman the obvious assurances, asked for his silence, and sent him back to his garage.

I was still innocent enough to think, if Victor made a log of our sins, no one's would be worse than mine. I didn't want a search made for any supposed journal.

‘He was teasing Norman,' I said.

Alec showed me his unconvinced eyes.

‘Norman's a backward damn mechanic,' I said, more desperately. ‘As naïve as Victor's readership. Listen, most of us are men in our twenties. What could he say about us? That once or twice we visited brothels?' My indelicacy caused a small pained flicker of Alec's eyebrows. He believed Norman's story because it had subtleties to it which were beyond Norman's powers of creation. The arguments (which, Norman said) Victor had used to explain how no one was damaged by a press exposé were exactly the reasons a glib and contradictory man like Victor would have touted.

Alec massaged his forehead gently with the tips of his fingers. It was a mannerism of his, a little rite to ensure a clear brain. ‘I don't want him to know yet. It could be painful to him.' He nodded in the direction of Sir Eugene's temporarily vacant alcove.

I could have said, he doesn't need to be coddled. He's forty-three years old and leader of the New British South Polar Expedition. But it didn't suit my purpose to be peevish.

‘Watch the stove,' said Alec. ‘Though it's hard to burn a journal in a stove without half a dozen people knowing. The burning of a journal is quite a winter incident …'

I went back depressed to my auroral painting. But yesterday's vision was stale today and I didn't want to spoil the work by putting a distracted brush to it. My mixed paints dried in their little pots and still I had not managed a stroke.

While I sat useless at the easel, the neurotic certainty came to me, rapidly taking my body over in the style of a virus. Quincy and the American were making a hole in the ice. Quincy and the American would, for reasons the virus would not specify, slip the journal through the ice.

Light came from something – from the moon low in the north, from stars, perhaps even a minor radiance from the winter sun above New Zealand. We did not need our lanterns, they lay unlit. Hoosick manned the winch, and Quincy and I lanced ice fragments in the hole we had at last made. If we ceased spiking in the hole new ice would form, thin in one second, impermeable in ten. I was happy however to deal with the stubborn freezing instead of with the persistence of suspicion.

‘All right,' Hoosick said. The words meant nothing except that he was happier than he ever was in the hut. I suppose he knew what to expect of men, but never knew what biological surprise might come up from under the ice at mid-winter.

He began to winch the net-and-bucket out of the hole. As it came up I saw the flashes of gold in it. In the instant before the water in the bucket froze, he lifted out the fine mesh net and dropped it in a wide-mouthed Thermos flask held and now capped by the parson, Quincy. Some of the splashings shone golden on his gloves, yet winked and went out as the water turned to ice.

‘Diatoms,' Quincy explained. ‘Copepods. The food that krill live off.'

‘And whales live off krill,' I suggested.

‘That's right,' said the Rev. Quincy. ‘It's the first time anyone's dug through the ice to find out if krill might still be there at mid-winter.' He had so much pride in his brother biologist. I looked at him hopelessly. In which colleague could I safely take pride?

‘Gentlemen,' Hoosick said, ‘please keep working with the spikes.'

For in a few seconds of idle conversation ice inches deep could form in the hole.

Oh, it was cold out there beneath the afternoon stars. When I left the hut just after 2 p.m., Waldo's instruments promised a freezing forenoon. –55°, I believe, the alcohol thermometer read. A breeze had come up and put an edge to that.

‘If there are copepods, there are krill,' said Quincy. ‘And if krill, then perhaps Byram is correct in his surmise. That whales may stay in Antarctic waters in the winter. Not by choice, of course. But through a failure of the navigational or mating instincts.'

I imagined a vast blue mammal nosing under the thick ice, its instincts jangled.

Quincy coughed, set his face, and paused. He had all at once remembered Victor and so did not want to go on explaining krill and whales to a layman. ‘Not this far south of course,' he said at last. ‘They have to breathe, you see. At least every hour or so.' He harpooned the ice in the hole. ‘Not this far south. But the presence of the diatoms is, you see, a sort of negative proof …'

I saw tears start from his eyes and freeze on his cheeks. I was awed by someone who could actually weep for Victor.

After he composed himself he said, ‘You know, Byram is a fascinating fellow.' Byram, five yards away and down-wind, could not hear him. ‘Full of feelings of damnation. Yet such an appetite for the natural world. Yesterday he was concerned with a minuscule parasite out of a fish's gut. Now his mind is on some great blue whale lost under the sea ice.'

‘Feelings of damnation?' I repeated, for that was the phrase that had taken my attention.

‘Well, I mean, hasn't he ever said to you …?'

‘No.'

‘Oh, I thought he said it to everyone.
I'm going to hell, you know
. He often says it to me. As often as Barry Fields says he's a socialist.'

‘Why would he say that?'

‘Because he's wealthy.'

‘I thought that in America wealth was a sign of salvation.'

‘Not to Byram. Of course when he says hell, he doesn't mean a conventional hell. He claims to believe in reincarnation. Perhaps he's afraid he'll come back as a mean little parasite in a fish's gut. Whereas he wants to come back as a fin-back whale.'

‘All right,' Byram called. ‘I'm lowering the apparatus again. This time to ten fathoms.'

I thought of Hoosick's infamous and frail mother, who herself had sought contact with great mammals. Her apogee had occurred on the day she bribed the King's chauffeur in St Jean-de-Luz. Oh, the impact of US railroad and stocks money, that it could corrupt a royal chauffeur! The result was that King Edward had a puncture on the road to Biarritz. I suppose a puncture is, like death, a reminder to a King that certain impassive physical laws are at work. Edward stood in the road waiting for another car to appear. When it came and the equerry had flagged it down, it proved to be the vehicle of the American pursuer, Mrs Hoosick. All he needed, Edward said, choking but gallant, was to travel with her back to Biarritz. And so, behind her own tight-lipped chauffeur, she rode through the town, the grandest wintering-place of Europe, with a King at her side.

Edward said of her rival king-chaser, Mrs Moore, ‘There are three things in life which one cannot escape:
l'amour, la mort
and La Moore.' The name Hoosick, you see, was a little too much for his powers of punning. But an equerry bravely said, ‘There are four things, sir. There is also La Hoosick.'

Hoosick had to poke the bucket down through the chunky ice with a pole. Whenever I stopped spiking I could feel the cold dragging on my heart. The crazy surmise that had brought me out here had now evaporated. These men had better things to do than contribute to the body organic of the murder by slipping journals through the ice.

The net and bucket brought little of visible interest up from its ten-fathom drop, and I was pleased when they decided it was time to go indoors. I toted the crowbars for them, for they needed both their hands for carrying indoors their canisters of marine treasures.

‘Are you cold?' I asked.

‘It's a cold day,' Quincy admitted, but conversationally. Hoosick shrugged. ‘It isn't too bad.' The cold hadn't touched their core, because they were still brothers and could not feel the new malice in the wind.

We made for the western door so that they could go straight in past the darkroom and put their Thermos of copepods in their biology cubicle. In front of that west door however two figures in windproofs stood. Antarctic moonlight is sharp and even men in heavy windproofs have an individual way of carrying themselves. We could tell from thirty yards away that the two men were Sir Eugene and Barry Fields.

Barry said, ‘But you consider yourself exempt, Sir Eugene.'

‘That is the nature of rules,' Sir Eugene told him. ‘The legislator isn't bound by his law.'

‘Well,' said Barry, ‘I don't want to argue with that.' Though he immediately began to. ‘But this is a rule that has to do with a measurable good. I broke it but so did you. And so I wonder about the validity of your original ruling.'

The phrases ‘measurable good', ‘validity', did not surprise us. We could all guess the way he spoke in public – the closing off of all emotion by the false statement that he was a socialist; the efforts to prove he was a redneck – were fruit of his being colonial and feeling himself both much better and much worse than we native Britons. Even now that America has been two hundred years self-governing and the pound is lunging down towards a dollar and a half, you can meet some of the same responses in Americans.

In any case, Quincy and Hoosick and I stood back politely. We could tell Sir Eugene was angry and it embarrassed us. We tried not to notice how stiff his body was, as it always was during his rare furies, giving you the feeling that he was dreaming of the recourses of eighteenth-century captains – flogging, and chaining in the cable hole.

At last he said, ‘Mr Fields, sometimes you are a pain. I would like you very much to help me when I give orders by imagining that you are a rating in the Royal Navy and I am your superior officer.'

‘I don't know,' said Barry, ‘if I'm quite up to stretches of the imagination like that.'

He nodded, turning inside, slipping on the iced doorstep but leaving Sir Eugene unappeased in the open. We still stood back a while and I think even Hoosick and the Reverend Quincy were confused at seeing Sir Eugene a little desperate and strident, as mediocre men are when they issue orders. Authority is an unpopular concept now, but in McMurdo Sound we depended as much on a quiet and rational heart of authority as we did on the promise of spring. Sir Eugene was the heart. It seemed from what we had seen that the heart was not secure.

He let Hoosick and Quincy pass through, making merely polite talk.

‘An interesting haul?' he asked as Hoosick passed him.

‘Lots of copepods, sir,' Hoosick said, still awkward.