The Ice Child (25 page)

“How are you doing?” Gina asked Jo, in a quieter moment. They leaned against the house wall and watched Sam balancing bricks on his tractor seat.

“Can’t complain,” Jo told her.

It was their usual coded conversation about money. Gina worried that Jo had none. Jo constantly reassured her that work was flowing. Of course, Gina knew that that meant Jo worked all hours, fitting it around Sam’s play school and baby-sitters. But it was useless to suggest that Jo might have been in a better financial position if Alicia had not muscled her way into Doug’s estate.

It was a particularly thorny subject, one that made Gina’s blood boil, and that Jo always claimed that she would rather forget.

After Doug’s death they found that his financial affairs were in a mess. The worst kind of mess. In the hassle of buying the house and moving home only six weeks before, the solicitor told Jo that he had advised Doug to redraw his will, which was ten years old and left everything to Alicia. Doug had promised to do so—in fact, he had written out a draft document at home—it was among his letters. The draft made it clear that Jo was the new beneficiary. But it had never been signed, never witnessed.

Jo had been left with half of the Lincoln Street house, and her flat in London. That was it.

Alicia laid claim to the other half of the house—the half in Doug’s name—and all his savings, which amounted to some fifteen thousand pounds, and a set of shares that had been, in turn, left to him by his father. Jo was astonished to find that these were worth almost forty thousand.

It was a lot of money. Enough to ignite Alicia’s temper. Not two weeks after the funeral Jo had received a letter setting out Alicia’s rights under the existing will. It ought to have been a blow—perhaps an unbearable blow, one too many. But Jo had been just too shocked to take it in. It was Gina who waded in on her behalf, hiring a firm of solicitors who acted for
The Courier
.

“They’re shit hot,” she had explained to Jo. “They’ll see Alicia off.”

But Alicia had not been ready to be seen off. She had dug in her heels, citing John’s precedence over any offspring that Jo may or may not produce.

That phrase had almost given Gina a seizure. “May or may not!” she’d ranted to her own mother. “Does she think Jo’s making her pregnancy up? Is she hoping she’ll miscarry?” She had knotted her fists in a gesture of intense, impotent fury. “That’s what she’s hoping for, the jealous bitch, I bet. I’ll see her burn in hell,” she’d vowed.

But Alicia had not burned in hell. She had remained alive and kicking hard, and at the end of the summer—eleven months, from start to finish—Alicia had graciously accepted Franklin House and the forty thousand in shares and the contents of Doug’s bank accounts. Jo kept the Lincoln Street house. Finito.

Gina looked at Jo now; her friend was leaning her head on the wall, rolling the wineglass stem in her fingers. She had her back to the lawn, shading her eyes against the sun, listening, with an absentminded expression, to Catherine and Mike’s conversation alongside her.

Then there was a sudden scream behind them.

Jo dropped her wineglass. It shattered on the stone path without her even registering it. Sam, who had, unseen by her, been balancing for a few seconds in the back of the new trailer, had toppled out of it. He had landed on the tractor.

“Oh, my God,” Jo breathed. “Sam!”

She dashed across the grass. Sam was lying crookedly, one leg still on the trailer side, the rest of him on the grass. He looked up at Jo with an expression of surprise; then he began to cry.

One of the mothers who had been sitting close by had run up too. “It was just a second,” she said. “I was watching him.…”

I wasn’t, Jo thought guiltily.

“He hit his head on the tractor,” the mother said.

“Sam,” Jo cried. She knelt down next to him and picked him up. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “It’s all right now.” She pushed his hair back from his forehead and saw a small cut above his eyebrow. It seemed to hit her in the solar plexus, the thought that he was bleeding. She glanced up to see Eve at her side.

“Bring him inside,” Eve said.

A little procession of people went back into the house: Sam and Jo, Catherine, Eve, Gina, and Mike. They sat down on the couch and Catherine brought a box of antiseptic wipes. Jo tore one open and wiped Sam’s forehead.

Eve, meanwhile, was looking him over. “No broken bones,” she said.

“It was such a bump,” Catherine murmured.

Gina glanced at Mike, the unspoken thought passing between them that it had been their trailer, their present.

Eve smiled as she rubbed Sam’s leg. “He’s fine,” she said. “Let him rest just a second, get his breath back.”

Gina brought a feeder cup of orange juice. Very aware of the eyes on him, Sam played up for a second, turning his head away from the drink until Jo made a move to put it down, when he grabbed it and drank greedily.

“Maybe a little sleep,” Eve said. “Five minutes’ peace.” She glanced up pointedly at the group in the room.

Gina took the hint. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said. She pulled on Mike’s arm.

When the door was closed, Jo sat back. Sam wriggled a little in her lap, throwing his arms over his head. Then, bored, he turned over on his stomach and slipped down onto the floor, dragging his feeder with him. Catherine sat down on the chair opposite, her eyes glued to Sam’s progress. Then she glanced up and gave Jo an apologetic grimace, as if to say that she should have been looking out for the boy. But Jo returned the look with a barely perceptible shake of the head.

Sam, meanwhile, was bumping his way, on his bottom, over to the window, where he stood himself up to get a look from the window.

Jo looked over at Eve, smiling.

The other woman’s expression halted her in her tracks.

“Jo,” Eve said quietly, “how long has Sam had those bruises?”

Twenty

It was almost two years since the ships had left Beechey Island.

It was no use saying anymore that they were the pride of Her Majesty’s Navy; it was months, in fact, since Augustus had thought of them as ships at all.

They had ceased to be the giants that had set out from Greenhithe in 1845; they did not race, or keel over in the strong salt spray. Their rigging did not ring anymore; it had been taken down fourteen months ago and never put back again. They were no longer, even, floating objects that might be described, by some flight of the imagination, as a boat or a vessel. Because they did not float in water. They would never float in water again. They were ice, part of an endless white landscape.

Erebus
and
Terror
.

He had asked one of the royal marines, Mr. Daly, what the name
Erebus
meant. Daly said that it was strange that he had come so far without knowing what the title of the sister ship signified. Gus had always supposed that it was a god’s name. One of those Roman gods, or Greek. That was what it sounded like to his untutored ear: he thought it might have been the name of one of those angels, half men, half spirit, who could fly. It had a lilt of flight, after all. It was a fast ship. It had a kind of wings.

“It’s a name for our predicament, to be sure,” Daly said. “A name and a half, Gus.”

“Is it good?” Gus had persisted.

“Good?” Daly had shaken his head. “No, Gus.
Erebus
means darkness, boy. It’s the place between heaven and hell.”

So, Gus had thought, half of them were in terror, and half in darkness.

It was March now, 1848.

This was the year that Augustus Peterman would be fifteen.

He had grown out of his clothes. For a while he wore a pair of trousers that one of the sailmakers had made for him: too long and too wide, he had been a figure of fun, but he did not really mind. He pulled the waist in with a belt and let the legs hang over his boots. They were warm breeches, if not fitted. And he was grateful for that.

No, it was not the trousers that bothered him, but the jacket. It seemed to him that his arms were so much longer, in proportion, to the rest of his body. And, as he grew, the sensation that his limbs were not rightfully his only got worse. Sometimes, in the dark, he would still think he had Torrington’s fine-boned hands. Sometimes he would think he was taller than it was possible to be … curious, a thing he could not explain. He felt monstrous—so large that he would never get out of the hatchways, never get back on deck. The feeling would wash and recede, wash and recede, like waves on a shoreline. His map of himself, the map of the body that was stored in his head, felt as if it had been tampered with. His fingers were broad and flattened; his knees ached and felt huge; his feet were splayed, like the snow-shoes they took on journeys. And sometimes he couldn’t feel the edge of things. Tables, pencils, the brass corner of a swinging lamp. The rim of his plate. Sometimes he couldn’t even feel the fur that lined their outer coats. And that hurt him, because—he would not have told this to anyone—he got comfort from the fur, stroking it.

There were other things wrong, of course. Everyone had something wrong. Some of the men had had the first signs of scurvy—bleeds under the skin, and their teeth affected. Most bore it with nonchalance; a few had even lost teeth, on previous voyages, to the illness. Others became breathless before they even had the swellings of the skin and the bruises. To any man who showed a sign, the surgeons prescribed two ounces of lemon juice, sweetened with sugar and diluted with an equal amount of water. On the
Terror
Crozier insisted that every man affected swallow the lemon within his sight, to make sure that it was taken.

With a few of the men the problem was not physical illness so much as it was the dark, the winter. It had shocked Gus to see that the prospect of another winter really disturbed a handful of the sailors. He hadn’t been able to understand it. They were handpicked; used to the sharp decline of the light, the sound of the wind, the long weeks of twilight. Yet, in November and December of 1846, two of the men on
Terror
had broken out of their confinement belowdecks during a storm. They had gone out in the earliest hours of the morning—no one knew quite when—and let themselves down the side of the ship, and run away from the ship, into the howling blizzard. It was fantastical, he thought, even now: unbelievable. To do such a thing was certain death, even within a hundred yards of the ship. The temperatures were thirty degrees below zero. They took no special precautions other than their usual workwear. Worst of all, what they had done could not have been predicted.

They had not even been rebellious, mutinous. They were both quiet men, both enlisted at Woolwich. They did not know each other, especially, however, and could not have been described as friends. That they had both been seized by the same demon—and demon it was decided upon to have been—was chilling, astounding.

“In the Americas they call it cabin fever,” one of the mates had told the crew. “When the winter’s in, and no one moves out of the forts, and the log cabin gets too small for a man to bear.”

“Now I am cabin’d, crib’d, confin’d,” murmured Mr. Helpman, the clerk-in-charge. But he would not say what poet had written it, or from what play it might be.

“Never known it before,” muttered Wilks and Hammond and Aitken, who had also come on at Woolwich.

“Fever of the mind,” the mate decided.

And so it was. Mind fever.

They found them two days later. They were together, about a half mile from the ship, in the direction of King William Land, as if they had been making for the shore. One lay on his front, curled, defending his face with his hand. The other lay, curiously, on his back, his arms raised in the air, his knees drawn up. They were frozen solid; and they buried them where they lay, cutting a great hole in the ice and lowering the bodies into it.

Nothing more was said of them.

It was in May of last year that Sir John had ordered a search party to go out to King William itself. He named Lieutenant Gore and Mr. DesVoeux, from
Erebus
. The party’s orders had been to leave messages in cairns, but by far the most important part of the job was to go south, as much as twenty miles south, to see where the ice leads might be that could set them free. It was high summer coming; they had perpetual light. Mr. Gore, the search team leader, was to find the passage that would take them home.

Home.

Every man’s heart rested with that team. Mr. Gore’s task was to find a little channel—it did not have to be a very big channel. Somewhere out there in the endless white monotony, he was instructed to find a small stretch of clear water. He was to find it, that’s all they wanted. Just find it. A little blue water. A little fresh current. A chance. A chance.

They all dreamed of that open water. They all hoped for that breaking of the way. Stuck, alone, isolated, seemingly forgotten, they were so close, they felt. So close to a breaching of the ice pack. The summer would bring it; and, even if it did not bring it right to the ships, by melting the grip of the winter floe, it would bring a lessening of the pressure, a scent of salt, a warm draft of air. It would bring possibilities. And Mr. Gore had just that one simple task: to find that scent, to see the way it lay. To haul them back, with the overladen sledges, a dream of freedom. A dream of human companionship.

Gus knew, of course, that they were not really alone in the world. Somewhere, far past this place, the world went on just as before. There were cities; there were fields and trees. There were roads and railway tracks and houses. There were churches and farms.

But it was hard to remember them. Gus felt as if they had been cast away. The fate of the seagoing man for centuries. Castaways, the only living creatures left on earth. Sometimes that feeling would be briefly broken—they had bears within sight of them, sometimes—and, very occasionally, they even glimpsed men. Natives. Faint figures who could be seen a distance away, eastward. Their dogs could be heard, the sound of barking drifting across the intervening sea. Sometimes there were hares or ice foxes, and a few were trapped. And once there were falcons, and once deer.