A Victim of the Aurora (8 page)

I said I understood.

‘I've asked AB Stigworth not to gossip,' Alec told me dolefully, as if he'd been forced to suspend all civil liberties.

‘He had a frost-bitten hand,' I said. ‘
That
seemed to preoccupy him.'

‘Quite. And Paul was in a condition of shock.'

‘And as for Nikolai,' concluded Sir Eugene, seemingly reading from some notes in front of him, ‘he appears to have been hysterical. Nor is his English adequate for spreading rumours.'

With a little shudder, he turned the notepaper over.

‘Cause of death!' My aggression took even me by surprise. ‘What was the cause of death?'

Sir Eugene made a little affirmative grunt and inclined his head farther.

Alec said, ‘First he was hit. There's a lineal fracture here.' He patted the back of his own head delicately. ‘Then he was strangled. You saw the bruising around the trachea and carotid. In addition, there was the blistering of the face and the freezing of the limbs.'

‘We can't tell these things to everyone,' Sir Eugene said. ‘It would throw everything into doubt. Trust. The manners of men. The expeditionary purpose.' He began dismantling and inspecting the bore of his pipe. I have noticed the annoying obsession with pipe cleanliness in other men at times of bereavement and crisis.

‘The temptation,' he went on, ‘is to pretend, not just to others but to ourselves, that it was an accident of climate. Only ourselves and the person responsible would know we were lying. But pretending is a mental trick I can't quite manage.'

I was thinking of Barry and his questions and the absurdity of Barry breaking a brother's skull and choking him with big bruising thumbs, putting an onus of investigation and punishment not on some impassive outside authority but on the people of the hut. I thought of Waldo and Kittery and Paul and Quincy. It was all ridiculous.

Sir Eugene picked up further notepaper and read the time-table of Victor's afternoon. Victor had done the two o'clock reading and left the results in the meteorology hut. Then he spent a short time watching Paul embalm the skua. (So Paul had mentioned aloud at the dinner table that night.) Perhaps he'd rested and read more Holbrooke. Then, towards half past three, Rev. Brian Quincy went looking for him and found him in the latrines. The Rev. Quincy and his friend Hoosick had made a new parasite discovery and Brian considered it of sufficient news value to inform Victor about it. Victor promised to come and see Quincy and Hoosick as soon as he was finished in the latrines. But he had not kept the promise. Instead, dressing fully, he'd gone out for a walk in the blizzard; and had met somebody. ‘With what results we now know,' Sir Eugene concluded.

We sat silent a while. The blizzard wail had such intimidating resonances.

Sir Eugene murmured, ‘Alec has a suggestion that may save the sanity of all of us.'

‘Yes,' Alec began instantly. ‘Last autumn three men reported seeing a human figure in McMurdo Sound. Harry Kittery was first. He said he was working on the Barne Glacier, sinking a core for an ice sample. He looked up and saw a man standing on a moraine ridge two hundred yards away. He called to PO Henson to look but when Henson did so the man was gone. Next Barry Fields claimed to have seen a man at Hut Point. The distance involved was half a mile, which is no great distance in this atmosphere. Barry said the man seemed to be clubbing a seal at the edge of the tide crack.'

‘I hastened,' Sir Eugene confessed, ‘to label it an illusion. The Forbes-Chalmers effect. It seemed to me no human could occupy Antarctica long on a solitary basis. I didn't believe it to be biologically possible, and I certainly considered it wasn't – what will I say? – emotionally possible. Now that this has happened I am tempted … merely tempted … to revise my ideas.'

Alec continued, as if on a cue, to whip up an outline, an acceptable silhouette.

‘Even after the Leader had given the phenomenon that name, PO Percy Mulroy claimed to have seen a man walking across the lower slopes of Erebus. It was from a distance of at least a mile and the weather was deteriorating, but Percy certainly believed – and believes still – in the man's reality.' Alec began hammering the palm of his hand gently with his own pipe bowl. For a second, he bit his lower lip. ‘I saw the man too. It was just like the time Harry Kittery saw him. We were at the Adelie penguin rookery half a mile down the coast. I had Paul Gabriel with me and PO Bertram Wallace. Wallace was catching the birds – he has a gift for it, his father was a falconer you know, not that falcons and penguins have much in common. Wallace would hold the Adelies while Paul put a numbered tag on their ankles and I took note of the number on a sheet of paper. We want to see if the numbered penguins come back to the same rookery next spring for their mating. Anyhow, I looked up while Wallace was chasing some penguin chick and the man was only a hundred yards away on a rise. I couldn't see him in detail because the light was behind him. I could tell he'd run if I shouted, so I hissed at the other two, but by the time they looked he was gone. I … I didn't make much of it because it's not one of the purposes of the expedition to find Antarctic Crusoes, and in any case the light in this country does perform tricks, not subtle ones either. But that's four of us who thought we saw a man. I think now we must have.'

‘I pray,' said Sir Eugene, priming him, ‘that you must have.'

‘Of the men counted as dead on Holbrooke's expedition, only the bodies of Forbes and Chalmers weren't found. As you may know, Forbes and Chalmers started on a journey from Holbrooke's hut farther down this coast for the Taylor Glacier. It's a contracting glacier on the other side of McMurdo Sound and the valley it leaves as it contracts is dry – it doesn't fill with snow, no one knows why. It is one of those Antarctic puzzles. Anyhow, Forbes and Chalmers began the journey in autumn. It happened that the autumn that year was one of ceaseless blizzards and Forbes and Chalmers neither returned nor were they found. Later Holbrooke was pilloried for negligence and delay, for not supplying them adequately. But they could have disappeared no matter how well they were equipped, given the weather. If, however, there is a man – other than ourselves – in McMurdo Sound, it must be Forbes or Chalmers.'

Sir Eugene murmured, ‘The Forbes-Chalmers effect is therefore well-named.'

I had noticed before that the relationship between Sir Eugene and Alec was a perfect king-chancellor one. Sir Eugene made the pronouncements and Alec did all the annotating. As he immediately began to do again.

‘Last February some of us visited Holbrooke's hut. I noticed two things that surprised me. For example, Holbrooke says in his journal that when the relief ship turned up in February of 1909 the expedition was down to one crate of cocoa, a hundred and twenty pounds of biscuit, ten pounds of butter, twenty-five pounds of rice, eighty pounds of pemmican. Enough to keep twenty-five men alive for ten days. He says that the members of the expedition were so delighted to see the ship that they left all the food behind as a sort of tithe to the fates that had saved them. I was surprised to find no supplies in the hut. But I found something written on the wall. It said
John Forbes, Dead in Christ, 1908
. Large lettering. Done in charcoal. It … well, it didn't look like the sort of thing Holbrooke would have wanted on his walls.'

‘Too accusatory,' said Sir Eugene, ‘for Holbrooke's taste. He didn't want to be reminded of his dead. He still resents it if he's questioned …'

I could see that Alec believed heartily in this surviving man who wrote on walls and took and ate the tithe Holbrooke had left for the gods. But at the same time I sensed Sir Eugene encouraged this belief only as a mental therapy for Alec and me, to keep us sane. The way an atheist father wants his daughters to believe in God on the grounds that the belief will make them behave more chastely.

Alec, however, was now deep in his thesis.

‘My theory, therefore, is that Victor – who is a newspaperman of the modern style – somehow made contact with Forbes-Chalmers and was to meet him again today at a certain time. That Victor, in spite of the blizzard, skied out this afternoon in case Forbes-Chalmers (we don't know which one of them it is, though the inscription at Holbrooke's hut indicates Chalmers), in case he kept the appointment. After all, a powerful journalistic motive would have been at work in Victor. An appointment of that nature would be the only sane reason for going out this afternoon. Discovering Forbes or Chalmers would have been a journalistic tour-de-force he may not have wished to share with the expedition. My theory then is that Forbes-Chalmers must have repented, for some mad reason, of meeting Victor and killed him to protect a manner of life which must be barbarous and painful yet, in Forbes-Chalmers's mind, superior to meeting us or returning to the world.'

We all three sat silent for a while, relishing for a second Alec's hypothesis that we were whole again, the Cape Frye community. That the cancer was interior. But I think Sir Eugene, like myself, wondered why anyone would set and, more still, keep an appointment in the midst of a Beaufort Scale
II
blizzard.

Sir Eugene studied my face a while. ‘You understand,' he said, ‘the necessity of the lies at the dinner table? Death from exposure, following an accidental head injury, and so on? If I tell them Victor was killed by Forbes-Chalmers, a theory I can't accept totally myself, then it will raise the parallel possibility that he was killed by one of them. Lies are a risk but I hope I'll be forgiven. You know and Alec knows and I know that Victor was murdered. As a result, our heads are spinning, we are dazed, we don't know what to believe. If all the people knew the cause of Victor's death, the confusion – the stupefaction – would grow tenfold, possibly by the square of ten. Where would we go to hide from each other, to be safe from each other? What doors could we lock, what authorities could be called in? I won't admit to them how Victor died. It is information that would make us barbarians.'

I felt a rush of panic at being elected to this inner committee of three. ‘Why?' I asked. ‘Why plague
me
with the truth?'

Because you already know it, they told me. Why not Paul Gabriel? I asked further. Paul Gabriel's view of Victor's injuries had been confused by shock and nausea. Besides, Sir Eugene told me, Alec had spoken to him and made sure. Paul's apparent confusion was real.

Alec had spoken to him … for Sir Eugene wasn't confident of his ability to talk to men directly. He was happier making a speech, his eyes travelling from man to man, taking in the collective not the individual face.

Alec Dryden picked up a piece of paper. ‘We find that of all the expeditionary members, only Waldo, yourself and myself were in the living area the entire afternoon. Waldo and you and I – we didn't even visit the latrines.'

‘Good for you,' Sir Eugene murmured with a brief private smile. He suffered from a condition called
tenesmus
. It was a cruel form of constipation which
Webster's
defines as ‘a feeling of urgent need to defecate or urinate, with a straining but unsuccessful attempt to do so.'

Alec had taken up a further sheet of paper. ‘I have a crude list of other people's movements. It's not something we can ask directly – where were you, so-and-so, when Victor was killed? – but men have naturally tended to say what they were doing when Victor was dying. They're tantalized, you see, by the thought of how easily they could have dropped what they were at and gone and found him.'

‘I head the said crude list,' Sir Eugene announced. ‘And, of course, if I'm the responsible party, then we're all finished.'

Alec read, Sir Eugene had visited the latrines after lunch and then wrote his journal and a memorandum for Harry Kittery concerning ice-formations. The Leader pestered Harry with dilettante theories about the conditions that cause sea ice, the sequence of states it goes through until it is pack-ice, its decay until it becomes ice-cakes and brash ice. Sir Eugene's theory was that the sea began to turn to ice only when water vapour fell out of the air and made the first ice crystals on the ocean. Harry Kittery believed that the ocean froze from within itself. A major question, you might say. Yet Sir Eugene often wrote Harry notes about it, as if to put the boy on the right track.

After this, Sir Eugene (according to the list of movements) had gone to the sailors' quarters to help in the repair of sleds. He was fetched from there by the news that Victor could not be found anywhere.

Alec himself spent the afternoon in his corner, writing and illustrating an article on the embryology of Adelie penguins. Harry Kittery had been in the laboratory, reading the memoranda from Sir Eugene perhaps. Paul Gabriel had been embalming his skua. Brian Quincy examined and discussed with his partner Hoosick the function of a new parasite they had retrieved from the gut of one of their more important catches, an Antarctic cod.

In fact, for Quincy and the restrained American the examination of this tiny bug who infested the intestinal tract of an impressive fish had produced a further and greater scientific success. As the little parasite lay under their microscope it had bled out its minute body secretions which, during the lunch hour, while Quincy and Hoosick were taking a quick meal, had turned to crystals. Hoosick, who had more chemistry than Brian Quincy, tested the crystals and discovered that they were salt. Both men instantly felt a creative excitement, a potent intuition. They knew with a certainty of the blood, rather than of the deductive mind, why Antarctic cod could live un-armoured, un-blubbered and healthily in polar water, at depths where the temperatures were actually
below
the surface freezing point and should very quickly freeze the cod's blood. If the small sea-vermin got its saltiness from the cod, then maybe the explanation for the cod's success was salt. They had already re-frozen the cod's carcase. It lay in Walter O'Reilly's storeroom to the east of the hut, the room you got to through a door from the galley. They re-thawed the cod by plunging it in hot water and got what smears of blood they could from it. The results of their tests were not therefore of the highest clinical quality. Nonetheless they found that the blood of the Antarctic cod was a broth of salt and haemoglobin, that it would go on flowing when a salmon's blood was long frozen.