Death on the Ice (61 page)

Scott finished the letter to his wife and, as quickly as his numb hands would allow, penned letters to Barrie and to the mothers of Bowers and Wilson before his stiff fingers gave out entirely. He hoped he had explained well enough how wonderful his two companions were. Are. Still alive, but barely. The end could not be far off now. They had decided, like Oates, that it would be a natural death.

With shaking hands, Scott lit the feeble spirit lamp they were cooking with, and scooped up a pannikin of snow from outside. It was still swirling white, as it had been for a week. Or was it more? He had to admit he was losing track of time in the cocoon. Still, it was bad enough outside that he wouldn’t get his wish to simply the in his tracks. The tent would be their coffin.

‘Tea anyone?’

The other two grunted from within their bags. He didn’t tell them it would be the final one. The original plan had been for the two of them to strike out for fuel from the depot. Then, as the blizzard and Wilson’s feet worsened, for Bowers to do it alone. On a fine day, he could cover twenty-two miles, the round trip, easily enough, particularly as he wouldn’t be sledging. But the storm refused to abate. It taunted them in their little prison, laughing at each nibble of frozen pemmican or sip of insipid cocoa. Scott had put curry powder in with his pemmican and had only just stopped paying the price in indigestion and stomach cramps.

‘Be along shortly.’

So the final scene would be played out in this shabby tent, rather than on the march. Not that he could walk anyway. Only a few days ago he had won The Best Feet In Tent award. Then two toes went, now all of them on the right had gone. The ankle had swollen, too. His foot rivalled Oates’s bloated limb. Amputation was required. But he didn’t fancy Bill sawing at it with a clasp knife. Not that Bill could really hold a knife now. His hands were gone. They were a sorry bunch, with Bowers the fittest in body, but quieter than ever, clutching his prayer book in his bag.

Eleven miles short. Such a pity. Could they have come through, as he suggested in his message to the British public, if they had not tended their sick? If Oates had walked out earlier rather than wait till it made no difference? Who could tell? The ways of providence were inscrutable. Now, all that remained was to choose the manner of passing on. Bill wanted them to have good clean, Christian deaths—Oates had effectively scuppered the idea of taking refuge in the pills—with no regrets.

Scott was denied that latter luxury. There was plenty for him to regret. Yet, he supposed, much to celebrate. It was up to him to tell the world about these men and their deeds and the manner of their deaths. To make King and country proud of them, causing the whole Empire to marvel at what Englishmen could do. He had started the diary for publication; now he was writing for posterity and Peter. He was already a ghost. As someone had said, they were as substantial as smoke on this continent. Just smoke on the ice. Who had said it? No matter.

As he waited for the ice for the last cup of tea to melt, he picked up his journal and pencil and scribbled a few lines. His hand was shaking, though, and his fingers ached with the effort. When he read it back, the page was barely legible. He put the pencil down. Pity. It really was too cold to go on.

The blizzard had gone now, blown out, although the biting cold remained. Scott had slipped away, not long after Bill Wilson had breathed his last. Despite the scabs and cracks on their skin, they looked at peace, the scowls and grimaces that had plagued their last hours on earth gone for ever. Now, there was only Birdie Bowers alive, his own appointment with the great passage over to the other side ticking down.

The times he had shared with the doctor often came back to him during those hours as he tried to ignore the famine clawing at his stomach. He found himself recalling that mad expedition to fetch the penguin eggs in the midst of winter. What had they been thinking? He remembered Cherry’s fingers, like ripe plums, as he struggled to get the blubber stove going. Of the boy’s disappointment when he broke some of the precious eggs, the goo dripping out of his mittens where he had stored them. The lost tent, the thought they might the in their bags, out in the open, the needle-cold temperatures, the rags of their clothing. Cherry begging Bill to give him morphia, to end it all, and the doctor refusing. Bill, like him, was a Christian and he was glad it hadn’t come to that, then or now.

At least their deaths were as God clearly intended. He recalled Bill, at the end of the winter expedition, telling them he could not have hoped for two better companions. Cherry, tears in his eyes, saying the same thing. Poor Bill, and his poor, poor wife Oriana. Then there was Oates’s mother, not to mention his own, Emily. And Taff, with Lois, and Norman, Muriel and Ralph. Kathleen and Peter, too. So many hearts yet to be broken.

Could he have spared at least one of those people? When the wind had dropped, Bill had told him that he, Bowers, could make it back to One Ton if he tried. Perhaps he could have. But with the wind in his face when he turned, he doubted if he could have made it back. How could he have abandoned his skipper? And to be the only man out of five to come back, the sole survivor? How would that seem? His place was here, with Scott and Wilson.

Besides, that discussion about him trying for One Ton had been hours ago, perhaps a day or more. The last of his once-formidable strength had almost ebbed. One Ton was beyond him. Birdie Bowers, though, had saved enough for one more task.

By the light of the last, guttering candle, Birdie had read the captain’s final entry in his journal. He didn’t agree with it all—it seemed cruel to blame poor Taff for any of this—but he couldn’t alter it, not really. If he had the fingers he would have written in his own book that Scott was still puzzled and devastated by Taff’s collapse; it was so unexpected, so untypical of the big Welshman.

Some would no doubt claim it was because Evans was a seaman, not an officer, perhaps, but that was piffle. Taff Evans, Lashly and Crean were a match for any man on the ice. If only he’d owned up about his cut hand, Bill Wilson might have helped. Too proud, he supposed. Like Oates. They were all too proud; Scott especially, but Birdie Bowers too. His own greed for the Pole had caused him to cast aside his concerns about the wisdom of four on skis and one not, and the division of supplies for five, not four. And the oil, the treacherous oil. He hoped God would forgive him for all his arrogance.

Apart from the suggestion that it was Taff’s fault, Scott’s was a fine document, one to stir the hearts of every Englishman. Briton, he should say. And he was gratified by the skipper’s final appeal for the country to look after those left behind.

But to do its job, to give the Owner’s words the power and passion they required, the document needed to be found properly. So he reached over and pulled the sleeping bag down, away from Scott’s neck, and exposed his upper body so that he was mostly free of the reindeer sac. Then he pulled and heaved, sliding the dead body upwards, into a half-sitting position. He rested once he was satisfied, till the fire in his lungs and tubes subsided. Then, he carefully took the fallen pencil and slid it into Scott’s cold grip. In the other hand, he placed the diary, glad there was still enough flexibility in the waxy fingers so that he appeared to be holding it. He pressed them together as hard as he dare.

Birdie leaned back and admired his work. Yes, it would do the job. Now, Robert Falcon Scott looked as though he had completed the final entry in his journal, that stirring Message to the Public, just before he expired. It was only fair. It had been his expedition, his success and, in the end, his glorious failure. The rest of them were just fellow travellers.

The effort to move the frozen, stiff limbs left him wheezing. Birdie Bowers was, for the first time in his life, drained of all power, an engine with no steam left in the boiler to drive it.

He leaned over and kissed the captain’s ravaged cheek, did the same to Bill’s forehead. Satisfied with the scene he had constructed, an exhausted Bowers pushed himself down into the bag, leaned against his superior officer’s shoulder, and closed his eyes, certain he would wake up with his friends in paradise.

‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’

Tennyson,
Ulysses.

Inscribed on the wooden cross that sits on

Observation Hill as a memorial to the five.

Chosen by Apsley Cherry-Garrard.

I
T WAS, IN TRUTH,
far too blustery for a relaxing walk on the beach, but, after lunch, Kathleen Scott insisted they brave the winter winds. The intense, melancholic little boy that Peter had become stayed behind, painting a decoy duck a livid green. Gran put on his RFC great coat and a scarf given to him in New Zealand when he returned from the ice.

As they stepped outside, the air carried hints of rain. Kathleen sniffed the dampness. ‘You know, I was always wished I had been with Doodles when I heard the news about Con. I wanted to hug him so. Instead, I sat on a beach in Raratonga, in the drizzle.’

She had been at sea, en route to New Zealand via Tahiti. The message came by radio: ‘Captain Scott and six others perished in blizzard after reaching South Pole, January eighteenth.’ Not six, of course, as she later confirmed. She had needed all her self-control to carry on. They had assigned her an officer, who shadowed her in case she flung herself overboard. But she had Doodles to think about. Suicide was not an option, just as, in the end, it hadn’t been for her husband.

‘All those terrible images. I still get them sometimes, of the last few days hauling, broken in body and spirit. Those final ten days in the tent, the blizzard snapping at them. Men fading like wraiths. They don’t come as much, thank God.’

Gran began to collect pebbles as they walked, looking for smooth, flat ones. It reminded him of yet another puzzle. ‘I never understood why they carried on dragging the rocks,’ he said, flinging a pebble into the grey sea. ‘They were still there on the sledge when we found them.’

‘I think because, having lost the Pole, they felt they had to come back with something of value,’ suggested Kathleen.

Gran wasn’t sure hauling thirty-five pounds of extra weight on those hideous last marches was worth the effort it must have cost them. But he supposed it was only a fraction of their total weight; and whether a sledge moved easily over the surface was more important than dead weight. The stones, with their coal seams and primitive tropical plants, would have pleased Scott and Wilson. That was some consolation.

He spun another pebble and watched it skim. ‘Four times,’ he announced. ‘Not bad.’

‘How did you get her to stop?’ Kathleen asked.

‘Mrs Oates?’

‘Yes.’

‘My Scandinavian charm?’

‘That woman is immune to charm of any nationality, Trigger.’

He didn’t mention his letter from Soldier or, indeed, the diary. They had discovered the journal when they had gone looking for his body. There was no sign of Titus, just his sleeping bag and the diary, abandoned by Scott when it was clear Oates wasn’t coming back from that blizzard, during the three survivor’s last desperate march to within eleven miles of One Ton. With no corpse, the relief party had erected a memorial to Oates, a note stuck to a cross commemorating a brave man.

Gran hadn’t read the diary; he gave it to Atkinson to take care of, who eventually handed it to Teddy Evans. Gran often wondered if his story of a misjudged love affair was in there, the one Titus had outlined in that final, sad letter to him when he delivered the flag at Hut Point. How a young Titus Oates had become infatuated with Edie, a low-born Catholic girl who fell pregnant. How Mrs Oates had sent her off to Ireland to have the child and had paid the family for silence. While in the Inniskillings Oates had tried to trace Edie several times without success. Trigger didn’t want to share that story with Lady Scott. There was no need; he had another explanation for Caroline’s withdrawal from the field.

‘I told her that Oates had asked me to ensure that your husband wasn’t blamed.’

Kathleen Scott looked puzzled. ‘Before he left, you mean? He knew they were going to fail? Even before they started the journey?’

Lady Scott clung to the belief, expressed by her husband, that Taff Evans and Oates, by faltering as they had, had helped contribute to the catastrophe. ‘Not at all. He was sure they would make the Pole. Do you believe in dreams, Lady Scott?’

She started to laugh but realised the Norwegian was serious. ‘In what way?’

‘We spent a long time talking about dreams and premonitions that winter, waiting to go out and search the barrier for Scott and the others.’ It had seemed interminable, those bleak months of darkness that prevented them launching the hunt for the polar party. There was also the question of Campbell’s northern party, who had been marooned somewhere on the ice all winter. Who to look for first? Scott, who was surely dead, or Campbell, who might be alive but on his last legs?

The vote was unanimous, if riven with guilt at the choice. Find Scott.

They had finally begun a serious search on 29 October and found the bodies on 12 November. At the tent, before they collapsed it and made a cairn, Atkinson had read Scott’s journal out loud and they had pieced together the terrible fate that had befallen the five.

‘What exactly did you dream?’ Kathleen prompted him. She had seen all too often how polar men seemed to drift away from reality, their gaze suddenly ill focused, their minds, and sometimes bodies, back on the ice.

‘I dreamed Amundsen had made the Pole on the very day he did. I have witnesses. People I told.’

‘Well, that could be coincidence. It was on your mind. And you are Norwegian. Perhaps it was wishful thinking.’

‘Lady Scott! I did not wish my skipper to be beaten.’

The vehemence surprised her. ‘No, of course not.’ Even Nansen had been ambivalent about Amundsen’s victory. For most Norwegians it was a tainted prize and Amundsen had not become the hero he had anticipated would be his due. One of his crew, who had been denied a place in the final five, had even shot himself upon his return: Hjalmar Johansen, a great ice man by all accounts, who had saved Nansen’s life in the North. Fridtjof had told her that Amundsen was already disillusioned, that the South Pole had not secured him the place in history he had imagined for himself, that perhaps posterity would judge the real victors to be the men who had died.