A Victim of the Aurora (26 page)

As he spoke he would now and then fiercely pinch the bridge of his nose. My arms twitched as the electric anger ran through them. I wanted to cross the few feet to Victor's meat and punish it with my hands and spit on it like a Sicilian. In my Mediterranean fervour I had even forgotten that the corpse would be approximately as yielding as granite, that my spit would freeze before it stuck.

‘I'll watch him,' I promised. ‘I'll watch him every second of the day.'

After giving this offer ten seconds' thought, Sir Eugene picked his lantern up, implying we should leave the meat cave. ‘Very well,' he told me. It was not consent. He was just giving up for the moment. ‘And thank you.'

When we were in the open and walking side by side past the dog-lines, the dogs yelping at us in the hope of exercise, he began to talk again.

‘I want you to remember, Tony, that circumstances like these can endow me with powers over the people involved in the expedition. Powers that are as absolute as a Pharaoh's. If ever I decide to use them, I expect your obedience.'

I know now that I must have understood the meaning of this satrapal statement as soon as it was uttered.

Paul remained exemplary the rest of that day. He washed and dried his two sets of thermal underwear. He neatly darned an elbow hole in one of his nautical sweaters. He sewed a button, I remember, back on the left breast pocket of his woollen jacket. I remember also that he lost himself in the last hundred pages of
Miss Ravenel
at afternoon tea and sherry time, finished it with a sigh and, after dinner, chose a new book from the library for use in the tent. It was Jack London's
Sea-Wolf
, an undemanding story about a Dutchman who is thrown overboard by a collision at sea and is picked up and pressed into service by a brutal sealing captain.

Paul's eyes met mine as he came back to his bunk with the brightly-covered book. He showed a few seconds' awkwardness, as if he was guilty at being found with a bestseller in his hands so soon after strangling Victor.

‘Immortal literature isn't much use in some circumstances,' he said apologetically.

‘No. Of course not,' I told him.

At dinner itself, Sir Eugene began a conversation about penguins, perhaps so that he could watch Paul's reactions. Alec and Paul re-fought the argument of the morning. Paul seemed restrained and well-informed.

Afterwards I wrote a letter to my parents. Since I felt uneasy and alone, I did not want to go on a winter's journey without leaving behind a letter which in the long run would reach some handsome woman.

Dear Lady Hurley, (I wrote)

Tomorrow three of us go on a mid-winter excursion to find of all things an Emperor penguin egg. I do not look forward to the cold of that excursion with any confidence and anticipation. But I thought that this was a good opportunity to say how wise I think was your decision in our regard last year …

Memory of her spiked not only my mood but the blood in my groin. Yet I couldn't write of apposite things – breasts and white flesh and green eyes – without embarrassing her or forcing her to burn the letter. And I didn't want her to burn it. I wanted her to preserve it. I gave way to a second's daydream of how she would finger it and hide it from her not too intrusive husband, taking it out every spring, or whenever it was she went through her most private papers.

At the same time Alec wrote to his wife and Paul to his mother. When we had all finished we delivered the letters to Stewart's office. They would arrive in England in the European spring of the following year. The long term delivery, the idea that we might all freeze behind Ross Island, suited my feverish mood.

For those last twenty minutes before lights out I sat on the edge of my bunk listening to Paul scuttering around me, and watching Quincy stow spare clothing and a few personal things in a small sea-bag. What
I
felt was the sort of eve-of-battle paranoia I was to see in some soldiers in a few years' tune. What I saw in Paul, however, was eve-of-battle euphoria, and in Quincy, a friendly soberness. When Quincy put
The Book of Common Prayer
into his bag I resented him for the first time. Why did he want to utter blessings? Why did he want to put ritual frills on the raw task?

He saw me looking at him. ‘Tools of the trade,' he said, shamefaced.

There was no easy sleep to be had but, superficially unconscious, I saw an image of Alec and Paul staring over the black lip of a crevasse into which I had fallen and now dangled, spinning in my harness. My one thought was a sort of complaint to the gods – if someone had to dangle, it must be Paul.

I opened my eyes, understanding in a rush that I felt at risk travelling with him. Yet I was his advocate. My fear of him had to be sat on, bitten off, Whatever else. In case it crossed the living space and entered Sir Eugene and Alec.

It was, I remember, a night for unquiet sleep. Two hours after the lights were out, while I still lay awake, I heard an open-throated scream from the far side of the room. Mead was night watchman and I saw him shining his lantern in the corner where Barry Fields slept.

For an instant Barry sat upright in his bunk, his eyes stark, his mouth still opened for shrieking even though the shriek had died. Then his face composed. He looked at Mead and correctly understood that he had woken the whole room and possibly the sailors too.

‘Sorry everyone,' he called. ‘I dreamed I was at my wedding.'

AB Stigworth woke me early. It was easy to rise instantly, without drowsiness. There was a feeling of momentum in the hut, even though all but five of us were sleeping still. We began our breakfast, talking quietly, but the others rose early anyhow and began to drink our tea.

There was a forced brightness in all the faces, the sort of aching smile I would see on officers new to the Front in the coming unsuspected catastrophe. After we'd been to the latrines, a robing of ritual proportions took place. I took off the trousers and old cardigan in which I always slept and put on first the new thermal underwear I had warmed by the stove. Then a woollen shirt and ditto trousers. Next two woollen sweaters (we carried two extra on the sleds), a woollen jacket with a hood, windproof fur-hooded top and windproof trousers. Two woollen socks on each foot inside a felt under-shoe and finnesköe of fur. For our hands, mittens inside woollen over-gloves inside wolf's fur gauntlets.

The others were all outdoors to cheer when Paul and I dragged on the harness of our sleds at nine o'clock. Quincy, behind us, harnessed himself to the lighter load on a half-sled, holding his and Sir Eugene's small tent and rations and the supplies they would depot for us on the far side of Pram Point. Sir Eugene and Alec walked beside us, inspecting the loads for incipient instability.

They sang the anthem of the King who (they did not know) had already died. They sang then
Why Were They Born So Beautiful?
Men of their age. Sublime and ridiculous.

By the standards of the summer, we were dragging small burdens and using three sleds to do it. But before we had got them over the tide crack and on to the ice, I could tell with gratitude that it would be brutally hard, that I would not have room for thinking in the next few weeks, that I would exist on a level of sinew and belly muscles and basic thirsts that involved no dangers with Paul.

What can I say about the climate and geography of that day? –67°F. Wind 15 knots out of the eternal south. Little Inaccessible island growing out of the sea ice on our right and the shore on our left. Humidity? There was no need to state a percentage. If you let the dry air in your mouth it instantly stole moisture from your tongue and palate and fused them to each other. Continually I wanted to drink. We stopped on the hour and scooped up snow into our mouths and smiled at each other.

We had agreed, for some reason, to do without the noon meal that day. It was a plausible decision, since a meal meant the raising of the tents, the lighting of cookers. But, in the breaks from sledding, I craved food, I felt it was merely humane to feed up someone as uncertain as I. There was little to distract me from hunger. There was no aurora that day, the light did not extend as far as the grand mountains of Victoria Land or even far up the slopes of Erebus. The landscape did not absorb me, as it could, by the hour. After a while I diverted myself by insisting on taking over Quincy's sled and becoming thirst-crazed as well.

In the matter of geography: we found ourselves off Hut Point by mid-afternoon. We could see Scott's old hut and the crude wooden Celtic cross Scott has left on the point to honour the first man lost in McMurdo Sound, an Able Seaman called Vince, the victim of a summer blizzard in 1904. Seeing that cross there so close to the hut, seeing the hut itself, was a strain on the imagination. You felt that perhaps just round the point you might find shops and tram depots.

The hut was to have been our first night's camp but we had reached it too early. We could see to our front the cliffs of the ice shelf, quite luminous, quite dominant in the moonlight. Beneath their dazzle I did not realize that someone had been forcing the pace.

So I innocently dragged Quincy's sled behind the others round the line of Pram Point and up amongst the broken ridges of ice on its far side. By such jumbled routes we made a slow way to the ice shelf, heaving the sled up one side and down the other of great and luminous white slabs.

Now the terrain changed for us. The ice shelf was level though secretly pitted and crevassed. A giant and careless fracas between the ice of the land and the ice of the shelf had made abysmal fissures in the surface, across whose mouths there always lay a thin bridge of brittle ice which might or might not yield as you crossed. An expert, such as some of the canny dogs, could sometimes tell the bridge from the solid surface. Most of the time, nobody could.

It happened that, like the dogs, Quincy had an eye for minor changes in the surface. Perhaps it should have been some kind of symbolic warning to me when Paul and I had to wait in our traces while Sir Eugene, with the parson's help, probed and tested the surface ahead of us.

I could barely see the Leader's hand when he raised it in the dark, calling a halt. Later I would be amazed to remember that he announced, consulting the bicycle-wheel tachometer on the back of my sled, ‘That's excellent. Thirteen miles in this weather.'

He seemed to be saying there was a future in the journey, for all of us.

It was while Alec and Paul were putting up our tent and I was getting the cooker and supplies from our sled that Sir Eugene came to me. As he spoke he looked at Quincy who had been sent a few hundred yards ahead to detect crevasses so that tomorrow's journey would not suffer an early disaster.

‘You realize,' he said. His breath was still a little short from the march and his words thick with his sledding thirst. ‘You understand that we can't travel with Paul any farther?'

‘I don't understand,' I said. In fact, I understood instantly.

‘In bluntest terms, he can't live with us any more. I don't like the term execution …'

I began to laugh, but in anger.

‘What else can I do?' he asked. ‘Imprisonment? Supervision? Give him the option of suicide? I don't believe in suicide.' He coughed and scraped some caked slime from his lips. ‘I warned you yesterday. I tried to talk you round. I mentioned powers to you. Yet it's strange, I'm not commanding. I ask you to concur in my using them.'

What I said was, ‘When?' If I said ‘When?' it was because I knew what Stewart would attempt. Could I have been begging for more delay?

‘Now,' he said.

‘No. Of course not.'

‘Don't speak loudly.'

‘You'll have to do it to me too.'

‘I don't think so, Tony. Please understand our situation.'

I tried to be contemptuous, satirical. ‘Is it going to be a gallows job?'

He took a large revolver from inside his shirt and turned it over, displaying the means of extermination. Its barrel and revolving mechanism shone like wet sealskin.

‘Quincy won't let you,' I told him. ‘And I won't let you.'

He had already packed the revolver away inside his wind-proofs, as if he doubted what effect the cold might have on its working.

‘I've spoken to Quincy.'

I remembered Quincy packing
The Book of Common Prayer
. ‘I suppose you want his help in the traditional priestly roles?'

‘I asked him an hour ago.'

‘And he said yes?'

‘He told me to go to hell.'

‘There you are!' I said. Yet I whispered. There was a sort of impetus to everything Sir Eugene said now, and I feared that Paul would become aware of it and be terrified.

‘Of course there ought to be no loud and careless talk. It wouldn't help the boy. It would be punishment. And I am not interested in punishment.'

I shook my head in a way that still implied his harmless lunacy. ‘You're a bloody madman. Talking quietly to a scientist, a parson, an artist. Asking them to help you in an assassination.'

The polar knight blinked a little at my rhetoric and looked away to his right where Quincy, an earshot away, stood probing the ice surface tenderly with the butt-end of an ice-axe.

‘Quincy will help. I know he's over there looking for crevasses and hoping it will all blow away. So do I for that matter. But Quincy will help. He accepted my explanations, even though he was shocked. I hope you do too.' He turned half-on to me and called, not very loudly, to Quincy. The parson stumped back towards the camp. A tired man, a miner coming home. Ten yards away from us he stopped and tensed, somehow seeing the solid intention of Sir Eugene.

‘Please don't call out to him,' Sir Eugene murmured. ‘I don't want him to die in a panic and without warning.'

Both Quincy's mouth and mine were open, competing to make the first protest, when Paul and Alec Dryden emerged from our tent, having put up the inner lining. They moved towards Quincy's sled to find and erect Sir Eugene's and Quincy's tent. Dryden moved like a man at his ease, like a reliable country doctor, all his secrets being homely, West Country secrets.