A Victim of the Aurora (16 page)

We stood in front of the Leader's alcove. The curtain was drawn but we could hear him speaking evenly. ‘Of course,' he was saying, ‘if you don't care for my reasonable instructions you can always move down the coast to Holbrooke's hut. It doesn't have the comforts, but if your independence is so important to you …'

I heard a mutter of words. It sounded like Barry.

‘Very well, Mr Fields,' I heard Sir Eugene say. ‘If you see Stigworth, will you please tell him to put my sherry beside my place at table.'

The curtain opened. Barry came through, saw us, grinned awkwardly. From his desk, Sir Eugene also saw us.

‘Gentlemen,' he said. It was clear he had made a quick recovery.

We went in and Alec put the journal on the desk. ‘That is the rumoured journal Victor kept.'

‘Rumoured?'

‘Some of us had heard a rumour. You'll see, Sir Eugene, that Victor knew things very prejudicial to Anthony Piers and myself.'

Sir Eugene looked at us. I can remember blushing and hating myself for it.

He turned the pages. ‘Victor was morally defective,' said Alec. ‘All news was news as far as Victor was concerned.'

After studying the journal for three minutes Sir Eugene looked at us again.

‘There are two conspicuous omissions. They seem to have been ripped out.'

‘They were already missing when Anthony found the journal on the bookshelves.'

‘I suppose,' Sir Eugene said, ‘someone was trying to be sensitive towards Dr Warwick or me. Or to both of us.'

It was said off-hand. He was admitting no connection with Waldo Warwick.

It was to me they came, knowing I was involved yet sensing I had none of the true committee-of-judges stature which Alec and Sir Eugene (if
enjoy
is the word) enjoyed.

Par-axel's was a typical approach. He leaned over me as I finished my meal. He was wary, he was at the one time apologetic and angry. Seeing him and others like this, stooped as if the one public shame of their lives were now a physical drag on their shoulders, I felt some of that hatred of Victor that must have gone into his strangulation.

This was an age when people liked to seem infallible as popes. No one frets about their reputation now as men like Par-axel did then:
pure
shame could kill men then the way getting caught and being made to pay can very nearly kill men now. Therefore the contrast between Par-axel's anxiety and his tortured English was pitiable that day.

‘I hear,' he said in a highly audible whisper, ‘you find a little book of nasty pages belongs to Victor? Is it so?'

‘Yes, Par-axel.'

‘Sir Eugene has it?'

‘Yes.'

‘He is going to keep it?'

‘I don't know. I really don't.'

‘What does it say of me?'

‘I saw only what it said of
me
. That was bad enough.'

‘Oh.' He laughed a second. ‘Women?'

‘More or less.'

He began frowning. The hint of illicit love hadn't distracted him for long. ‘Whatever Victor said of me, truth or falsities, I want each everyone of the pages for burning.'

‘Of course. We should tell Sir Eugene that.'

Together we went to Sir Eugene's alcove. Though we were two apparent petitioners, I was in fact the decoy, leading Par-axel in.

Alec and Sir Eugene were both working at Sir Eugene's desk, as they often did in the evening. I rapped on the bookcase and they looked up.

‘Par-axel wants to speak to you, Sir Eugene.'

‘On the book belonging with Victor,' Par-axel amplified in his stage whisper.

So the curtain was closed and we sat, Par-axel and myself, on Sir Eugene's bed.

Sir Eugene lifted the
Journalist's Yearbook 1909
and dropped it back on his desk. ‘It contains some awkward information about all of us.'

‘My share of awkward information,' Par-axel began. ‘Does it say Beck loses six men in the mountains?'

Sir Eugene opened the journal to Beck's place and read a little of what was written there.

‘Beyond the Lapp Gateway,' he muttered aloud. ‘The Kjölen Mountains in Norbotten. The iron-ore railway. Does that sound right, Par-axel?'

Par-axel's face contorted, as if in preparation for tears. ‘Sufficient is sufficient,' he said. It was a saying he had. It meant, why can't people leave things alone?

‘You don't have to explain, Par-axel.'

‘But did you know about, Sir Eugene?' Beck wanted to know. ‘Did
you
know about?'

He worried for his expeditionary reputation, worried that Sir Eugene would now think him unfit to inhabit the Antarctic.

‘I'd heard something, Par-axel,' said Stewart. ‘You don't have to explain …'

But Par-axel could not be prevented from explaining. For the second time that day I found myself listening to a story about responsibility and guilt. Of the iron-ore railway from the Swedish Arctic town of Kiruna through the wilderness of Kjölen Mountains that gave on to the long fjords running down to Narvik, the iron-ore port in the infant state of Norway. In the early spring of 1908 a dozen avalanches obliterated the line on the Swedish side of the border and overturned and buried an ore train. The Swedes reopened the line for the summer, but wanted to survey another and safer route for the railbed. Par-axel, commissioned only a year but accustomed from boyhood to the mountains beyond the Lapp Gateway near Sweden's North-West border, was serving with one of the two companies of mountain troops garrisoned in Kiruna. He didn't like Kiruna, he said, telling us why briefly. His views on small-town life in Scandinavia were similar to those of Ibsen and Strindberg which would later become commonplaces with theatre-goers. Kiruna's melancholy was even more stifling because, being one hundred miles north of the circle, it suffered nearly two months of total dark. And the mountains beyond, said Par-axel, were like God's teeth.

Par-axel liked it best when he was on patrols or guiding survey teams in the mountains. He was in the mountains of Norbotten province during the first week of September. He had a section of soldiers with him and was guiding a squad of railroad surveyors. Some of the soldiers and surveyors got sick, a high fever. Beck and the others believed it was something they had picked up in the muskeg swamps between Kiruna and the Lapp Gateway. One morning, said Par-axel, he had an argument with the head of the survey team. They had five men sick. They should all, said Beck, stay in camp and nurse them, and rest, and watch for the outbreak of the symptoms in themselves. The head of the survey team, a man in his fifties, refused to obey a subaltern and said it was urgent that the survey team complete a certain series of triangulations in a nearby pass. Beck, himself unwell, sent his sergeant and another soldier to guide the four surveyors on a short excursion.

In the afternoon, a furious September blizzard rolled in from the west. Beck did not worry too much about the surveyors and his two men, for they were all sensible, had some food with them, and two flimsy tents adequate in such emergencies for three men each.

When the blizzard ended on the second morning, Beck ski-ed out to meet them, but they did not come back, and only two bodies were found. Against all their training and mountain experience, they had behaved like novices. They had not pitched the tents because the tents were found in the private's backpack. They had tried to get back to base camp and had lost touch with each other, calling uselessly in competition with the wind. The court of enquiry, Par-axel said, found their blizzard madness inexplicable.

‘Now,' he said, ‘now, Par-axel cannot show you he is not the Holbrooke kind of creature.' He meant, not as negligent, not as stupid, not as culpable. Today a computer would assess Par-axel under all these headings, but Par-axel-on-Cape-Frye could not hope for electronic exoneration.

As a reply, Sir Eugene tore out the Beck pages and handed them to him. ‘Burn them, Mr Beck,' he said.

I foresaw a time when there would be nothing but covers left to Victor's book of scandals.

For a second, Par-axel inspected the pages. ‘Ashes, they aren't enough,' he said, a perfect sentence. ‘No. Ashes never the end for any trouble.'

But he nodded and went, leaving me with Alec and the Leader.

Sir Eugene said, ‘Well, is it him?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘No. It can't be.'

‘Can't it?' Alec asked me. He seemed melancholic, a painful convert to the idea that the assassin was within the hut society. ‘I think of how the journal got on its bookshelf. I think of the likelihoods. Both depressing. A man who thinks he is shameful takes it from Victor's belongings and finds by reading it that we are all more or less shameful. You see, to put the journal on the shelf might be an act of pathetic despair. And the other likelihood is less comforting still. That an assassin put it there. In which case the despair is even more pitiable.'

‘Forbes-Chalmers?' asked Sir Eugene. ‘You were devoted to the Forbes-Chalmers hypothesis last night.'

Alec put a limp hand on the desk, closed his eyes and spoke in a still voice. ‘I wish it were still tenable,' he said.

Against his crisp analysis, the theories of Barry Fields and Walter O'Reilly – positing a plum-pudding fiend who enters a pantry from which there is no simple exit, yet does not raid the ice cave farther up the hill where frozen carcases are kept – seemed like village gossip.

Sir Eugene tore out Alec's share of Victor's journal and gave it to him. Then he tore out mine for me. The lights went out. ‘Is it eleven?' I asked in the dark.

We said our good nights and Alec stumbled off to find a candle to light him to the latrines and to bed. I had farther to travel and was further delayed by the small accident of ramming my shoulder against the bookcase.

‘Anthony,' said Sir Eugene.

It was not totally dark. The storm lantern for the use of night watchmen was lit and threw some small indirect light into the alcove.

‘Anthony,' said Sir Eugene, ‘the … er … the liaison between yourself and the … the lady. The … the liaison of which Victor writes …'

‘Yes, Sir Eugene?' I was alarmed. There was no air of Socratic elucidation about the way his shoulders hunched, about the uncertainty of his diction.

‘You mustn't think it indelicate of me, but …' He chuckled, doing his best to show he didn't blame me. ‘You know, when I was your age, pretty older women never approached me …'

I'm afraid, Sir Eugene, the approaching was all from my side,' I said, deliberately defending Anthea, and though he did not know it, Lady Stewart.

‘Of course, of course, it happens. More than we think. The younger man, the older woman. I think of the husband though.'

My face was burning in the dark. ‘So do I, Sir Eugene,' I managed to confess.

‘I'm not trying to cause you discomfort,' he said, increasing my profound unease. ‘My experience of these matters is not as extensive, for example, as my experience of the navy.' He waited. I heard his lips squeak as if he were bunching his face, one eye closed, the other focused on the comparative and unequal bulk of the two sets of knowledge. Knowledge of women. Knowledge of ships and the society of sailors. I stood in the dark, promising myself he would not ask me about the inner life of an adultery. No man could be so transparent, so much like a hurt child.

He asked me! He said, ‘Tell me? … The lovers … do they … mention the husband? Do you perhaps tend to … to mock him?'

I wondered if I could end the conversation by mockery. By asking, you want to know what Waldo and your wife said about you while they lay together? I also considered shaking him. Telling him, you're 43 and a great captain. You shouldn't ask a boy these questions. Did he believe a woman of his wife's stature or Anthea's would compare bodies or mannerisms?

My answer was out of my lips before I knew I had spoken. ‘I believe, Sir Eugene, that most decent women can make mistakes. But they would consider the sort of thing you mention to be the worst infidelity.'

He said, ‘That's what my sense and experience tells me. Thank you, Anthony, for allowing me to raise this delicate matter.'

Rather than grope across the room and search for a stump of candle by my bunk, I borrowed one from Alec. The stables were half-warm and gently lit by the radiance of Warren Mead's blubber stove. Warren himself was no longer there. The threat of glanders must have passed. The upright ponies snuffled, standing asleep.

Only one of the latrines was occupied, the farthest of the five. I entered a middle stall, closed the door and fixed the candle on the spike provided. I bared my haunches and sat shivering, welcoming the minor animal warmth left in the seat by a recent occupant. In a week, I thought, I'll be bedding down in a tent on the weather side of Ross Island. But I could not believe it. It was a surreal proposition to me.

I coughed. ‘Must be minus 55 outside,' I said aloud. Trying to achieve some old-fashioned, pre-murder, pre-journal small talk.

There was a brisk answer from the end stall. ‘At least, Anthony.'

Quincy.

‘What are your plans for tomorrow?' I asked. Just to make a noise in the near-dark.

‘I? … well, Mr Hoosick and I might try some ice trolling.'

The
Mr Hoosick
was very strange, and the voice cold and still brisk. I had been half-expecting this – that men could resent my knowledge of them, or of Victor's version of them. What was his news of Quincy? I knew that the English press loved a ripe parsonical scandal.

‘Trolling?' I said. ‘Again?'

Quincy coughed. ‘Today's haul is not quite adequate. Good night, Anthony.'

I heard him open the cubicle door and go.

I had a similar experience as I crossed the main room. Troy rushed to my side from his corner bunk. ‘I suppose,' he said, ‘the Leader's told you all about my crimes as a quartermaster. I mean, usually a sailor's record is the concern of sailors, a fraternal secret. But it seems that you and Alec have been admitted to some kind of all-knowing triumvirate …'