A Victim of the Aurora (13 page)

‘At mid-winter?' asked Sir Eugene. Usually his interest wouldn't have been so merely polite.

‘Yes,' said Hoosick. They were as uncomfortable with each other as a stiff schoolmaster and a shy fourth-former. I felt angry at Barry for reducing them all to this.

‘I wonder could I see you, Mr Piers?' Sir Eugene asked.

So the other two, who didn't feel the cold as intimately as I did, were allowed to go through into the warm.

‘Tony,' the Leader said. I could hear Norman hammering something in the motor sledge garage along the wall but it was a mere dimple of sound in the imposing silence and Sir Eugene's voice was low. ‘I've just – as Barry pointed out – broken my own rule by going for a solitary walk. I went to look for the place where you and Paul Gabriel found the deceased. Yes, I know. We should have done it earlier.'

‘No, no,' I hurried to say. ‘I didn't imply that.'

‘In fact it was an instinct of mine that someone might go early this morning – an instinct in the good sense of the word, a sort of rational expectancy for which you don't quite know the reasons. I knew the someone might very likely be the assassin or have knowledge of the assassin – otherwise, why go alone? In fact – unless you're a morbid personality, and none of the men seem to be – why go at all? That was my intuition.'

I was frightened by the frantic nature of his explanations. Did he want my approval?

‘I watched them all morning. It's easy to notice absence if you know where men are supposed to be. Harry Webb of course visited the dogs, and men went to read the two weather screens, but no one went as far south as the place where Victor died. I could tell by timing and also, I must confess, by spying on them briefly through the roof hatch in the workshop.'

‘That was a reasonable thing to do,' I reassured him.

‘After lunch one of the men came to me and I had a rather distressing interview. Nothing to do with Victor, although it's strange how a death will put people into a confessional mood.'

Sir Eugene coughed. His face seemed to dim and then even to shrink, but expanded again after a second.

‘I decided to go to the place myself. And Anthony, there's a problem.' He coughed, as if what he was going to tell me was a lapse from good taste. ‘There are only three remains of boot-tracks there. Only six feet. Only yours and Paul's and Victor's. To the best of what I can see.'

I frowned, considering the lack of an apposite number of bootprints.

‘I prefer not to deal with the question,' Sir Eugene told me. ‘Some days, however the mind works, it's usually wrong.'

This pessimism shocked me. He lived in a place where Barry or Waldo, Harry Kittery or Quincy or Hoosick could lithely harvest a new natural truth or at least a new theory per day. Yet here was the foreman of it all, telling me it was illusion.

‘But there would surely have to be a fourth man's boot-prints.'

He ignored my crass absorption in the physical world. He stood by and seemed to chew the inner lining of his cheeks.

‘I saw Barry Fields,' he said. ‘I saw him march over a hill of moraine near the bottom of the Barne Glacier. He'd actually gone walking out on the Barne alone, which no one has ever done anyhow, given the dangers. You heard the end of our conversation.'

I lied. ‘No,' I said.

‘Why would he go walking on a glacier? Doesn't he think we've had enough trouble?' He sounded like the tremulous father of a wild family.

At last we went into the porch. It must have been thirty degrees warmer in there. I could feel my heart still as a separate and harshly tried organ and now it seemed to gape and devour the warmth. Beyond the second door, in the body of the hut, the air would stand at (at least) a sweet sub-tropic 40° and despite my Leader's demoralization and mine, I wanted to get through to it.

‘There is a point,' he told me. ‘We'll find the killer before the egg journey. Because if we are confused, then he also is confused.'

We went through the second door then, perhaps both lusting that Forbes-Chalmers were more than a smear on the imagination, were real and homicidal, an outside threat like the threat of frost-bite. For frost-bite can be dealt with and is not an internal disease.

‘Snowshoes, Sir Eugene.' I whispered this to him. ‘The fourth man must have worn snowshoes.'

He let his head fall on one side. It fell slackly, so that he looked not avid but tired. ‘It could be. It could be.'

The indoors warmth produced a small elation in me. Under its motive power, I took my windproofs to my bunk. Paul Gabriel stood by it, talking to Quincy.

‘Are you going to move down into the lower bunk now, Brian?'

I saw Quincy blink at the question. The lower bunk had been Victor's until four o'clock the day before.

‘I think I'll stay in the top one,' said the Rev. Quincy.

‘I see.' Paul sounded buoyant, as if he'd got better suddenly from the shock and the mourning. He stared at Victor's bunk, the blankets stripped from it now, its palliasse bare. ‘Would you mind if I put some of my books on it then? We're pushed for space.'

I thought,
he can't see. Quincy wants it left bare as a memorial
. But to Paul it was only vacant real estate.

‘It won't worry me,' lied Quincy, slinging his windproof jacket on the post of the upper bunk. ‘Unless I bump them climbing up and down in the night.'

‘I'll keep it all tidy,' Paul promised. Quincy and I found each other's eyes, but Quincy turned away from the gaze. The first book Paul deposited on Victor's empty bed was Sir Arthur Gomboy's
Flightless and Primitive Birds
. Out of the enthusiasms Paul had picked up from such volumes I had been seduced into the Emperor egg journey.

Soon the palliasse was covered with heaps of books and monographs. Like Quincy I could not help feeling that a grave had been desecrated. Yet when he had finished Paul sat, panting a little yet pleased with his work, on the edge of his own bunk. ‘That's good now. Everyone will start to forget.'

I didn't tell him grief was more complicated than that. I nodded, but it was myself I was agreeing with. For he was like a child, trying to erase our memories with a heap of books. I thought then and I still think it was because he never had a named father, not even an absent one, from whom to learn, on whom to practise the skills and ceremonies (such as they were) of male respect, male aspiration and male sorrow.

‘It's nice of you to think of us,' I told him, and he smiled.

Barry Fields sat at the mess table, a little uneasy (I guessed) from his argument with Sir Eugene or, probably, with having seemed to win it so easily. He held in his hand a mug of tea, perhaps to show he wanted things back the old way, the way they were before Victor fell. And the sign of that was the tea he sipped slowly. Tea, the survival drink, the sacrament of normality.

I walked over and sat by him.

‘You heard the quarrel?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘Well, it's bloody ridiculous. Just the same … it's shaken him up, hasn't it?'

‘You silly bastard,' I told him, jovial in a forced way. ‘What were you doing up on the glacier?'

He hugged his cup. ‘I just skirted the edge.'

‘Purpose of journey?' I asked.

‘Forbes-Chalmers.'

‘The illusion.'

‘The joker himself.'

‘Come now.'

‘Listen, the man exists.'

‘And you went out to interview him?'

‘Men like Victor don't fall down and bump their temples. There's too much … too much
forward
velocity to their lives for that to happen. Listen, and stop treating me like a bloody mental defective. Belief in Forbes-Chalmers is not equivalent to belief in the evil eye …'

‘And you've been speaking to AB Stigworth,' I suggested.

‘Too bloody right I have. And Sweeper pays testimony to the mess Victor was and wonders how in the hell you get in a mess like that by simply butting your scone. Come with me.'

He led me towards the sailors' quarters and knocked. The door was opened by AB Bernard Mulroy. His fine, pale features and green eyes had a new and disquieting meaning for me now that Victor was dead. I frantically weighed my responses to him, testing for the faintest voltage of desire.

Barry wasted time on no such exercise. He winked at the sailor. ‘Permission to come aboard, Commodore,' he said.

Mulroy did not smile but held the door wide as we entered.

In the galley, Walter O'Reilly, chef to two Antarctic expeditions, sliced onions for a sort of casserole of leftovers from the mid-winter feast. When he saw us, he immediately took on the role he liked best, that of music-hall Irishman.

‘Evenin' gentlemen,' he told us. ‘It's after goin' to be a dull ole meal this evenin'.'

‘I don't believe it, Walter.' Barry came so close as to inhibit the action of his slicing elbow.

‘Walter, do you believe in the Holy Catholic Church?'

‘Yer know I do in a manner of speakin'. And it's why I were never made a Vice-Admiral of the Blue, yer know. Pure damn religious prejudice.'

‘Walter, do
you
believe in Forbes-Chalmers?'

‘Now Forbes-Chalmers is a different kettle o' hash, Mr Barry Fields. I'd say I'd have two separate attitudes to Forbes-Chalmers, given that he constitutes no mystery of faith. In me capacity as a non-commissioned officer I don't believe in him because he's after bein' a distraction to me labours. In me capacity however as a human by name Wally Ignatius O'Reilly, I'd have to say I believed in Forbes-Chalmers, yes, Mr Barry Fields, indeed, sir.'

‘Well so do I, Wally. Could you give Mr Piers an indication of the reasons for your belief?'

‘Can I go on choppin' here?'

‘Of course, Walter.'

‘I had puddin's stolen. Eight. Out of a crate I opened in May. A crate of three dozen Swallow and Ariel one-pound plum puddin's. We used seven every Sunday for four Sundays and the last eight weren't there the fifth Sunday I went to fetch 'em. Now, if we happened to be domiciled under the volcano of Vesuvius instead of under the volcano of Erebus, I would guess one of the lads had tea-leafed 'em and sold 'em, one way or another, to the local populace. Or if we were at anchor under Gibraltar I'd say the lads had snaffled 'em for a picnic or some such shore-leave celebration. But the idea of one of our lads lifting puddin's and taking 'em up a glacier where he sits on the lip of a crevasse and has a feast unto himself,
that
idea is entirely laughable, don't yer see? And that aside, Sir Eugene don't skimp on food. He didn't on the last trip, and he don't on this.'

This time O'Reilly's long-winded reportage didn't much amuse me. I walked to the door of Walter's storeroom and opened it. The walls of the room were of supply crates and the roof of timber beams and tarpaulins, erected on the same construction method as the stables. It was far below freezing in there. There was no direct way out, no hatch or door for a pantry-thief to escape by. The idea that the mythic creature, the trick of light, had been in here seeking cans of dessert seemed fantastic. Barry and the cook could both sense my resistance to it.

‘Of course, that's what a man in his situation,' Barry observed, ‘would go for. Something sugary. With raisins in it.'

Walter seconded him. ‘And the lads are sound sleepers. If one of them stirred and saw a feller walkin' about the hut, what would enter his mind except that it was the night watchman comin' in from the weather screen? There ain't much of that insomni-ee in this habitation, praise God. As for me, I sleep deep, yer know, not before – ev'ry evenin' – takin' note of the way things are in me storeroom. Would yer mind closin' that door now, Mr Piers?'

I obeyed him, for the pantry cold was invading the galley.

‘You didn't raise this question with Sir Eugene,' I said.

‘Bein' in the Royal Navy's after like being Galileo. If the captain of the ship says the earth don't go round the sun, then a man don't argue.'

‘Thanks, Walter,' said Barry. ‘You've brought a lost soul to belief in Forbes-Chalmers.

Walter, dark-haired, handsome, lyrical, laughed and cried over his onions.

‘Would you like to talk to Henson?' Barry asked when we stood again in the centre of the room. ‘He had a large piece of sailcloth taken overnight. And PO Mulroy missed some timber. Are you convinced?'

I frowned. The phantom sought sugar. And was a handyman.

‘I was looking for some sort of ice-burrow,' Barry told me. ‘I was looking for blubber smoke coming up through a piece of stove piping. I didn't find any signs.'

I laughed.

‘What's funny?'

‘The idea of you. Looking for a chimney in some ice bank up there.'

‘Well there's got to be. There's an ice cave where Forbes-Chalmers lives. It's not comfortable by our standards but you can get used to almost anything. It's heated by a sort of rudimentary blubber oil stove. It might have a paling floor with gutters for melted water from the walls. It would have a crude bunk with blankets and maybe sealskin covers. He's probably got a freeze-room full of carcases of seals and penguins. These are his meat. He must have enjoyed his puddings after all those sugarless years …'

I remembered the way the cold had unmanned me that afternoon. ‘It isn't possible. No one could take the cold for all that time.'

‘It's possible. I don't mean Forbes-Chalmers hasn't wept with the cold, hasn't cursed and bloody raged. But you can live, weeping and cursing. Oh yeah, it's possible.'

We went back to the officers' mess and to Barry's tepid tea. He tasted it, made a face, put it down.

‘All of you seem,' he said, ‘to see his survival as the mystery. But the mystery is why he never lived in Holbrooke's hut. Why he didn't eat and make fires and sleep there. Because there are no traces, no fire-marks, no refuse. Instead, he's lived somewhere in an ice warren for four years. By choice. The basis of the choice, that's the mystery.'