The Ice Child (32 page)

“I’m here now,” Catherine said. “I’ll help you, Jo.”

The other woman shuddered in her embrace. “I know it’s a long shot,” Jo whispered. “But if it turns out that we don’t have a choice … If there isn’t another donor … then, you see, don’t you, Cath? You understand? John would be the only hope that Sam had left.”

It took another hour, but Catherine managed to get Jo downstairs eventually, after they had found the baby alarm that Jo hadn’t used in six months, and plugged it back on in Sam’s room.

Catherine made Jo sit in the kitchen while she made soup, and watched over her to make sure that Jo ate it to the very last drop.

Then she sat down next to her and held her hand.

“Maybe Alicia knows,” Catherine said.

Jo stared at her. “Would he write to her and not you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Catherine said.

Jo was sitting very straight, staring at her. “Do you think he might be working his way across to the Franklin sites, in Nunavut?”

Catherine shook her head. “Alone?” she murmured. “How?”

“Wasn’t there a photographer?” Jo asked.

“I can’t even remember his name,” Catherine said. “That was three years ago, and I think this man worked all over the world. Where would he be now?” she said, thinking aloud. “Maybe Alicia …”

Jo bit her thumbnail, thinking. “Would John ask Alicia for money?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Catherine admitted.

“How is he financing himself?”

“Working, I suppose,” Catherine said. “On excavations, or wherever he can.”

“He
must
have got in touch with Alicia.”

“Don’t count on it, Jo.”

Jo suddenly stood up and went over to the phone. “I’ll ring her,” she said.

Catherine swiftly got up and stopped her. “She won’t speak to you,” she told Jo. “She’ll hang up. Let me try.” She took a diary from her handbag. “I think I kept her number.”

The phone rang for some time before Alicia answered.

“Mrs. Marshall?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Catherine Takkiruq.”

There was a pause.

“Mrs. Marshall, I am trying to find John.”

“John,” the other woman repeated. Catherine could hear a slow intake of breath. “Why?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Why ask now?” Alicia demanded.

Catherine paused, acutely aware of treading carefully. To mention Jo’s name would be a red rag to a bull. “I wondered how he was,” she said.

“If he hasn’t written to you, I shouldn’t think he wants you to know,” Alicia replied.

Catherine frowned. “Has he written to you?” she guessed.

“I can’t see it’s any of your business,” Alicia said.

“But—”

“I haven’t seen you in more than a year, and suddenly—”

“But I thought you didn’t want me to come and see you,” Catherine objected.

“I didn’t say that.”

Catherine colored. Beside her Jo winced. She laid a hand on Catherine’s arm.

“When I last came to see you,” Catherine replied slowly, “you told me that you couldn’t see any purpose in my coming to Franklin House. You made it plain that I wasn’t welcome.”

“Together with that Harper woman,” Alicia replied, “you drove him away.”

“But that’s not true!”

“You hung around him when it was quite plain he didn’t want to see you.”

“That’s not right—”

“You never gave him a moment’s peace,” Alicia said.

This was so desperately, distortedly wrong that Catherine took a shocked breath, momentarily silenced. If anyone had driven John away, it was Alicia with her endless self-pity. Catherine had never once heard Alicia voice any appreciation of John’s despair. When John had told her of Jo’s words at the chapel, Alicia had been incandescent for days, interpreting it solely as an attack on herself through her son, a slight to her family. Jo had wounded
her
, stolen
her
husband, accused
her
son. It was as if John were a sideshow at Alicia’s personal drama.

“I have nothing more to say to you,” Alicia said now.

Catherine forced herself to keep calm. “Please, Mrs. Marshall. It’s very important … do you know where John is?”

But she was listening to a dead line.

Alicia had hung up.

Catherine handed the phone to Jo, to let her hear the disconnection, then hung up herself.

“Oh, God.” Jo groaned. She walked back to the table and slumped into the chair next to it. “That woman. Oh, God,” she repeated, wiping her eyes. “How are we going to get through to her? Do you think she knows where John is?”

Catherine shook her head slowly. “If she does,” she murmured, “she’s never going to tell us.”

They looked at the dark squares of the windows, at the night.

Upstairs, Sam began to cry.

Twenty-five

She wanted to teach him what was closest to her heart.

The unseasonal storm in the strait had swept east, and the bear was walking on the fringe of the sea ice now. Occasionally she would look back, sometimes seeing the cub stumble, sometimes standing still, looking away from her. It was this that confused her most of all, for cubs shadowed their mothers, watching and learning.

It was as if he were traveling away from her, focused on some distant object that was invisible to her.

She followed her instinct south.

Once, in the encroaching winter, she had been at Devon Island on Lancaster Sound, and she felt the echo of that winter feeding in her head, a winter that she wanted to give back to her son. If he had been strong she would have taken him there again, drawn toward the inlets where the beluga sometimes became trapped in moving pack ice.

The beluga had become trapped at an ever-diminishing breathing hole, and she had been with other bears who waited as the sea choked off the whales’ escape, and presented the catch to the bears as readily as a fisherman might haul in his nets.

The bears simply pulled the beluga from the sea and slaughtered them on the ice. Forty beluga, young animals, still gray in color. She could remember the smell now, the scattered blood patterning the frozen landscape.

She wanted to teach him to swim, the freedom of her soul.

But it was not good here. Not good halfway down the great, swift-running gulf of water. She hated the tremor from under the sea, the old imprint of fear. Its invisible mark might be here for centuries yet—the terrible echo from under the water, the trail of some dark memory on the edge of ice and land.

She grunted now as she came to the top of the pressure rise, and then stopped dead in her tracks.

An adult male bear was staring back at her: a mass of thin fur drawn over bones. She glared at him, lowering her head in her shock and surprise. She had had no warning that he was hidden there, half covered with the thinly blowing granules of ice. He looked back at her with a dead, exhausted eye.

Stock still, she assessed him. He was lying with his head on a raised hummock; he had come, it was evident, into the lee of the sea wind, to die. This was the end for any bear. He might be fifteen, twenty—perhaps even thirty—years old. His time was over, and she turned away.

As she did so, she saw the strips of darker color on the ridge. They were attached to even older bones than the male stretched out below her. There was no flesh left on them, but the stuff that blew about them was dark: strips of wet cloth. She tasted them before throwing them to one side. Not seal. She pushed the material aside and nosed at the motionless objects next to the skeleton.

Red-painted tins.

Nothing at all, less than nothing, to her.

She sat up on her hindquarters and gave a braying call.

The cub came slowly after her, picking his way over the long-dead human debris.

Twenty-six

Alicia left Cambridge early the next day.

It was a beautiful summer morning; but she drove almost without registering the sun. By six forty-five, she was on the outskirts of London, negotiating the M25, and was on the M3, heading south, by half past seven.

She put her foot down, and the towns of outer London and the southeast disappeared behind her. By nine she had left the highway and taken the long road across the tops of the Wiltshire Downs, passing south of Salisbury Plain and through Cranborne Chase, and emerging into the Blackmore Vale.

England had nothing more beautiful to show on that morning. The country of Thomas Hardy—the Vale of the Great Dairies, where Tess had searched for wild garlic in the pastures under the eye of Angel Clare—was spread in front of Alicia in a checkered green carpet. But Alicia simply frowned at it as she negotiated one narrowing lane after another. At one point, furious with herself for mistaking yet another turning, she stopped the car and sat with the map in front of her, and realized that she was trembling. She took several deep breaths, trying to unknot the tightness in her chest, the fluttering of nerves in the pit of her stomach.

The letter lay beside her on the seat. She looked down at the note she had written and taped to the page of the map.
Hermitage Farm, Cerne Magna
.

It was almost midday by the time she found it, tucked under a chalk ridge and a piece of woodland, with no sign to point the way, and only a huddle of decaying outbuildings betraying its working past. Four-wheel drives and a couple of old Ford vans were parked on the rutted lane and shoulder.

No one seemed to be about. Alicia walked through the yard and out onto the field, and, following the faint sound of voices, walked through the clumps of nettle and thistles and grass to a stone wall.

“Good morning,” she said.

The girl who was sitting on the other side almost dropped the cigarette she was holding. She looked over her shoulder. “Hello.”

“I’m looking for John Marshall.”

“John?” she said.

“Yes. Is he here?”

The girl glanced back. Somewhere in the trees above them the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon settlement was in its fourth week. As far as the girl knew, they had never had a visitor.

“Well, he’s somewhere about, I suppose.” She looked Alicia up and down, and, finally, stood up. “Are you from the university?”

“Not this one,” Alicia said. “I’m nothing to do with the excavation. I’m John’s mother.”

The girl’s mouth dropped open. But she said nothing. She merely looked Alicia over again from head to foot, then ground out the cigarette. “This way,” she said.

They went up the hill. Just before the top the ground leveled out, and on a flat piece of grass under the shade of the trees, half a dozen people were working in a series of shallow pits.

“Mike,” the girl said. “Someone for John Marshall.”

The man nearest her looked up. His clothes were coated in chalk from the ground. He hauled himself out, and wiping his hands on his jeans, he offered Alicia his hand.

“Mike Bryant.”

“Hello,” Alicia said. “I spoke to Charles Edge yesterday.”

Bryant nodded. “Yes, he rang me last night,” he said.

He hesitated. Alicia frowned. “John
is
here?”

“Yes …”

“Did you hire him?”

“Word of mouth. A friend in Bristol recommended him.”

“Do you know he’s been missing?” she said.

She hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation, but nevertheless, it came out that way.

“No,” Bryant said.

“He’s been gone for nearly two years,” she told him.

He looked hard at her. “We don’t ask for life histories when they arrive. I’m sorry.”

“He has a place at Cambridge,” she said. “He shouldn’t be here.”

“Look, Mrs. Marshall,” Bryant said, “I didn’t kidnap him.”

She bit her lip. “No,” she admitted. She felt a tic begin at the corner of her mouth: a tremor of anxiety. “No,” she repeated. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.”

Bryant frowned. He glanced at the crew behind him, some of whom had stopped work to listen. He touched Alicia’s arm. “Would you like to sit down over here?” he said.

“I’d like to see John. Where is he?”

“Maybe if I just talked to you first,” he said quietly.

He walked her over to a table and chairs. Brushing the dust from their canvas seats, he settled one on level ground and waited until Alicia was comfortable.

“I can see you’re a bit impatient,” he told her.

“Put yourself in my place,” she said.

He sat down next to her. “Yes,” he murmured. He picked at a loose thread on his shirtsleeve. “You see, John has … well, to say he worried me …”

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Is he ill?”

“No, no,” Bryant responded. “Not as such.”

“What, then?” she said. “What do you mean,
as such?
”

Bryant made an embarrassed face. “You know, we see a lot of different folks in this job,” he said. “Students, enthusiasts. Old bastards like me.” He grinned. Alicia stared at him. “That is—”

“I really don’t have all day,” Alicia said.

Bryant looked rebuffed. He sat back. “Did John ask you to come here?” he asked.

Alicia colored. “You know that he didn’t,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have had to ring half the country to find out who was carrying out an excavation in Dorset.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “But he will be glad to see me. I’m sure when he
does
see me—”

Bryant rocked back in the chair, hands crossed over his stomach. “John never wants to see anyone,” he commented.

Alicia stared at him. “What do you mean?”

Bryant’s face softened. He gave her a sympathetic look. “Mrs. Marshall,” he said, “I don’t interfere in students’ lives, I don’t tell them how to act,” he said. “But I worry about John. I really do.”

Alicia stared at him. Very slowly, Bryant brushed dirt from between his fingers. “John lives up here, on site,” he said. “He arrived with a tent, and he lives here. Camps here.”

“Don’t you all?” she asked.

“Some do,” he replied. “But John took himself off, out of their sight. Doesn’t come down at night. He”—Bryant gazed at her—“he just doesn’t talk, Mrs. Marshall,” he said. “And …”

He stopped, and then, slowly, stood up. He had evidently decided to say nothing more. He pointed up the slope, in the direction that she might find him. “Well,” he said, “you’ll see for yourself.”