Death on the Ice (4 page)

Her expression told him that she was confident he would. Then her eyes dropped. ‘I have never, ever, asked this before of anyone.’ She looked up and he felt pinned by the gaze. ‘I always stopped them when they tried to tell me. It seemed morbid. Gratuitous. Somehow prurient, even for me. But I think I am ready now. Finally.’

He could guess what she was about to request. ‘But Atch—’

‘Dr Atkinson wanted very much to spare my feelings. He spoke only in general terms.’

Gran swallowed hard. ‘You want to know what he looked like when we found him?’

It didn’t take much to summon up the image of that forlorn tent, all but submerged by the winter blizzards. Then came the scramble though the two-metre-high snow wall, digging to reach the inside, some insane hope of life within driving them on. The panicked ripping of the seams …

‘Yes. I want to know.’

 … the sight of the bodies, three of them, mummified by months on the ice.

The kiss Tom Crean had planted on Scott’s forehead.

‘I saw no sign of scurvy.’ There had been rumours that it was disease that had killed them. Atkinson, the surgeon, had told them the bodies bore no such signs. Instinctively, Gran added the other rider they had rehearsed, lest blame be heaped on the expedition’s organisation. ‘It was not starvation. Exposure.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she replied. Lady Scott was well aware that the official line was exposure, even though the party had run out of food and fuel. ‘What did Con look like?’

He could still see the ruined face, chewed by a whole winter season of frosts. ‘He was at peace.’

Lady Scott pursed her lips, irritated at the platitude. ‘I loved him, Trigger. My soul shrivelled to the size of a walnut when he died. Only now, thanks to Peter, is it healing. I loved him and knew him. He wouldn’t want you to say that unless it was true.’

Gran stared down at his drink. ‘He was in the middle of the three when we entered the tent.’

‘His face?’

Yellow. Glassy. Savaged by frostbite. The three gouged purple pits glistening on his cheeks, excavated down to the bone. ‘He was covered in a layer of frost, ghostly white.’ Ghastly would have been nearer the mark. ‘The breath does that. At extreme cold. Forms a rime in the tent. As Atch doubtless said, I think he was the last to go. I have often thought of him, alone, waiting for his time to come.’

She gave a small sob, a sound so alien coming from her, it made his own eyes fill. Gran reverted to what he had told the
New York Times
reporter. ‘He looked as if he might soon awaken from a sound sleep. I often saw a similar look on his face in the mornings, when he was of a most cheerful disposition.’

‘Was he always of a cheerful disposition in the mornings?’ she asked slyly.

Gran was well aware she knew the answer to that. ‘He was holding … ’ He busied himself with the sugar and managed to run a sleeve across his eyes. ‘He was still holding his pencil. It seemed to me he had been writing in his diary. His last act. As if he had one final thought he wanted to put down … perhaps to you. I think to you.’

She sniffed. ‘And the others?’

‘The others were still deep inside their bags, they looked like they had simply drifted off to sleep. The Owner, as I say, was half out, sitting up, as if in the midst of that one last effort of writing.’ He didn’t mention the snapping of Scott’s fossilised limbs, his arms breaking like a tree branch, as they positioned the trio for their final rest, or the sickening click of his tinder-like fingers as they released the diary from his grip. ‘The three were laid out, at rest. We removed the bamboo from the tent, collapsed it, and made the snow cairn. We sang “Onward Christian Soldiers”.’

‘I know.’ She took out a large handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘His favourite.’

Gran recalled the little semicircle of men, stifling their sobs. ‘You know you can’t hide crying on the ice. No matter how hard you try.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your tears. They steam as they come out into the cold air. We all had mist around our heads that day.’

She blew her nose again. ‘I can imagine. And you were one of those who looked for Oates?’

‘I was. No sign. Afterwards, back at the tent. We made a cross for the cairn from my skis and I took the Owner’s skis and used them to get back to the hut. So at least something of him made it back.’ She gave a small laugh at this; perhaps it had been a pathetic gesture. ‘We did odd things. Cherry took a copy of Tennyson from the tent. He had lent it to Bill. Said he was going to send it to Oriana.’

‘He’s a sweet man. Too sensitive, I fear.’

‘Tom Crean said, what an echo they’ll leave on this world. He was right. An echo that has gone round the globe. You know the rest, I am sure. From Atch. And Cherry. Your husband and the others, they died doing something great. There’s nothing else to add.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No,’ he lied. ‘Nothing.’

Teddy Grant was given permission by Major Gregory to forego the afternoon patrol and settled down in his bunk with the pages Lady Scott had given him. The typed manuscript had a title,
A Price to Pay
, and it was already heavily corrected. His batman brought him over-sweetened tea in a tin mug and a plate of biscuits, and he began to read, wondering why he was quite so nervous.

Because, he eventually assumed, Teddy Grant lived in the moment, because his life depended on it. Scout pilots were not philosophisers or daydreamers. He didn’t have time to think back, like Tryggve Gran, over days so cold you felt as if your spine could crack, of the crushing claustrophobia of a blizzard-lashed tent or snowed-in hut, the relentless, infuriating snap of wind-blown canvas. Now he would have to take himself back five years or more.

When he bit into the homemade biscuit he gagged. For a moment the consistency reminded him of pemmican, the high-energy dried meat-and-fat ration every polar explorer was forced to take. Gran chewed hard, letting the biscuit’s sweetness blanket the slimy echo of hoosh, the stew the British had made from the pemmican, biscuit, bacon and whatever else was to hand.

He knew within thirty minutes that Kathleen Scott had been telling the truth about her insistence on veracity. The work, apart from the verbatim extracts of the Scotts’ letters to each other, was measured and even detached in places, not unlike Amundsen’s rather workaday account of his race South.

Gran skipped forward to the events he had actually witnessed, and found himself impressed, albeit critical of some of the stilted words she had put into people’s mouths towards the end. Men simply didn’t talk like that on the ice. You had no breath for long speeches. There were hours with no communication at all, as each became lost in the painful rhythm of man-hauling. And there were technical problems, too, with statute and nautical miles being used interchangeably, as well as confusion over degrees Fahrenheit and Centigrade. There was no mention of the Winter Journey, the insane mission to obtain penguin embryos. And there was a spiritual element missing, a state of mind that only those who had been to the Big White could recognise: that when you stepped on to that ice, you somehow stepped out of time, into a different reality. Antarctica was ice, wind and rock, Oates used to say, and something else beyond man’s comprehension. Gran had experienced strange things at the Pole, events and dreams he couldn’t easily explain.

However, any flaws were easily corrected. But, to his relief, this was no hagiography, no love letter from a mourning wife.
A Price to Pay
was a cold, unflinching look at events out on the bleak ice barrier—the best and worst place in the world—five years earlier.

From under the bed, Gran took his old leather satchel and extracted from it a sheaf of papers. His diaries and notes, some pages stained with blubber, others with tallow, preserved so that he could one day put the story down. A single sheaf fell out as he opened it, a piece of paper prematurely stiff and yellow, the writing fading. Once blue-black, it was now tobacco coloured. It was a letter from a long-dead friend. He retrieved it from the floor and placed it back in the pages of his diary.

Between them, perhaps he and Lady Scott really could cover the complete history of the expedition and the events leading up to it. If Gran had a reservation, it was this: perhaps the war-weary British public—and possibly even Scott’s widow—simply wasn’t ready for the true story of Scott of the Antarctic and what really happened out on the ice, eleven scant miles short of safety.

‘This congress is of the opinion that the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken’

Resolution of the Sixth International Geographical Institute, London, 1895

T
HE TWO MEN SHARING
the cramped office in Burlington House on Savile Row sat formal and straight backed, sizing each other up as they conversed. They were hemmed into one corner of the room by untidy piles of boxes and packing cases. There were samples of the chocolate Cadbury’s would be providing, custard and baking powder from Alfred Bird and Sons, various recipes of high-fat pemmican, oil lamps of interesting design, candles, rolls of oilskin, britches and Burberry sledging suits. There was a great mound of finnesko, the fur boots the Esquimeaux used on the ice, along with bundles of the grass they stuffed in them for insulation. Next to them was a stack of the new double-compartment Nansen stoves shipped from Christiana. Elsewhere sat three different models of wooden sledges and a teetering pile of equipment catalogues, featuring everything from folding spoons to fur sleeping suits.

On the walls were two detailed maps of the Southern Hemisphere, with large lacunae where the most southerly continent should be. Dotted around the charts were images of whaling and sealing ships and the famous
Fram
, the polar exploration vessel of Fridtjof Nansen. Photographs of previous expeditions to both poles adorned the other spaces, men wrapped in so many clothes they lost any discernible human shape. Frequently they were posed before their tents or with their stranded ship as a backdrop. In the largest, a group of six with blackened faces, bandaged hands and raw, slightly haunted eyes were staring balefully at the camera. They looked shocked to find themselves there, on the ice, far from home.

There was even a husky pinned up, a grainy picture of a keen-looking animal on the snow, its harnesses laid out around it as if it were a canine maypole. The clutter, the hastily opened cartons and the carelessly displayed wall decorations lent the room a sense of fevered urgency.

‘As you can see, Mr Shackleton,’ said the older man. ‘There is much to do.’

Each was dressed in his civilian best. Commander Scott noted approvingly that Lieutenant Shackleton’s boots were as shiny as his own and his collar stiff and new. Shackleton at least buffed up well out of uniform, unlike some of his slovenly colleagues in the merchant service. Scott had already seen some howlers.

The commander picked up a piece of paper from his overcrowded desk and held up the report, which concentrated on Shackleton’s service record with the Union Castle line. ‘Armitage speaks highly of you. Which bodes well. He does not suffer fools.’ Bert Armitage was Scott’s newly appointed second-in-command, a good navigator, and a veteran of Arctic waters. He was also famously blunt in expressing his opinions.

Shackleton smiled. ‘Well, that’s good to know. That I’m not a fool. And to have it in writing. Grand.’

According to the dossier, the Anglo-Irishman had spent his formative years in England, so Scott was surprised by the thickness of his brogue. He wondered what they had made of that at Dulwich College. ‘You realise, of course, that, although yourself and Armitage are merchant men, the enterprise, and the ship, will be run according to Royal Navy rules and regulations.’

‘So I understand.’

‘And you will have to sign an undertaking to that effect.’

‘If required to do so, then of course I shall.’ Shackleton leaned forward a little in his seat. Slightly shorter than Scott, but bulkier, he exuded an earthy physicality. He possessed sharp, steady blue eyes that made Scott think he would be difficult to unbalance or panic. He was also six years younger than the commander’s thirty-two, although he did not act as if he were addressing an older man. Or, indeed, a superior officer. ‘And I appreciate that you probably would have preferred a crew made up entirely from your service.’

Scott smiled at his perception. He was expedition leader because of the patronage of Sir Clements Markham, president of the Royal Geographical Society. He had championed Scott in the face of opposition from other factions in the Royal Society and the RGS, which were jointly behind this voyage to Antarctica. In the subsequent sparring for total control, Scott had been forced to yield some ground. The societies’ scientists were no longer in charge of the expedition, but he had been restricted on how many RN personnel he could take. So he was obliged to turn to the merchant branch.

‘There are good men in both services,’ Scott said diplomatically. ‘However, we must have but one code of discipline or the result will be confusion and anarchy.’ He made a show of examining Armitage’s report once more. ‘Why do you want to go South?’ Scott asked. ‘Your record shows no predilection for cold climates.’

Nor yours, Shackleton thought, but didn’t voice it. ‘No, but I know square-rigged ships like the one you are having built. And there was the advertisement.’

‘What advertisement?’

‘In
The Times
.’

Scott tugged on his earlobe, as he often did when puzzled. ‘You think the Royal Geographical Society advertised for expedition members in
The Times
?’

‘Longstaff told me they did. Said I should get a move on if I wanted a place because so many would apply.’ Llewellyn Longstaff was one of the expedition’s more generous sponsors and had vigorously put Shackleton forward as a potential recruit. Scott could ill afford to cross anyone who was contributing to the expedition’s meagre purse, which is why he had agreed to consider the Irishman. ‘I have the wording still.’