The Ice Lovers (14 page)

David passed the bottle to Helen. She tipped it up, took a draught. ‘Thank you for surviving on that lonely shore, against all odds, to come back into the world and to give us David, who joins us here on earth now, because of your perseverance, your optimism, your faith. Thank you.' She handed the bottle back to him. ‘Sorry, I'm a cheap drunk. No. Cheap speech-maker.'

‘I'm in government, I've heard plenty of cheap speeches. Yours isn't so bad. To my forebear, and to Elephant Island, for failing to kill him.'

The Island came and went. There was no trace of those nights spent under the upturned boats, the raging wind, the men blinded by blubber soot, wet to the skin.

They stayed on Monkey Island far longer than either of them meant to, until they finished the bottle of Scotch.

I am being given a chance for a new life, with this trip.

How rare, to discover a portal back into life, through this frozen world. Alive-yet-dead; dead-yet-alive. Would she ever again feel herself to be truly part of life? She is haunted by the thought that she is just a dreaming ghost. On waking, she will discover she is not alive at all, as when ghosts rattle around a beloved house until they can be convinced they are dead.

We do not own our bodies, we do not own our fates. As it ages, Helen's body is becoming her mother's body. Her fate is not her own, either, but has been decided by something else.

David, too, has been disowned of something he thought his. His great-grandfather's experience has seeped into him. He has been abandoned on a blasted shore. This knowledge is lodged in every cell. In his cells, reindeer wander through the snow. Seals loll in brown pools of blood and urine, the shores slippery with penguin and albatross guano. When the men lay down in their tent that first night on Elephant Island, their body heat melted the guano underneath them. They awoke to find their tent lifted from them by the katabatics sliding down the steep ramparts of the glacier. The stench was unbearable. Their place of salvation was no more than a fresh hell.

David returns to this place every year, under the guise of a professional migration. But the truth is that his body is not his own, his fate is not his own. At times he wonders if he even owns his memories. The tough pale grass which looks like no other grass he has seen in his life, the stern stone covered with a mustard-coloured lichen, hard and ruptured, like barnacles. All this is embedded within him because he felt so at home, the first time he came to this rim of the world, the distant Southern Ocean. So this is where I belong, he thought, amazed. He was right, he had been unburdened from a dangerous misperception. He did not own his memories. He did not own his past. These had been bequeathed to him by a force he could not name, and he was merely their caretaker. In the end he would have to hand them back.

They sit in the bar. David is a bit drunk and drink makes him strident.

‘What do you expect to get out of this?'

‘Get out of it? You mean like resource extraction? Oil? Natural gas?'

‘I meant, for your career.'

‘I know what you meant.'

A silence. He is bewildered, rather than offended. He tries a different tack. ‘How did you become a writer?'

‘By accident.'

Why should she tell him that by thirty-five she'd put two abandoned careers behind her: a PhD in history, then journalism. Why should she tell him she is a person who leaves things unfinished, fundamentally a wayward character, fascinated by contradictions, accidents, ironies, bad luck, bad faith.

To the casual acquaintance, Helen would seem a high spirited character, good company, able to roll with the punches. But in reality she is a Russian doll; several selves collected within this outer carapace, each of them smaller, denser with loss. This was the heaviness, like a shadow in her eye. David was aware of it and like most people he shied away. He was unused to corroded characters, and so fascinated by them, too.

The more time he spends with Helen, the more he is aware of having to keep a complicity at bay. He hopes they will not sour to each other, as often happens – and so quickly – in these environments. Helen is the only person here who is on his level; he sees something of a comrade in her, a true adventurer overtaken by a papery existence, fighting her own destruction. He wonders if she feels the same about him. He knows he is not an easy person to like, remote as he is, detached, given to rituals of austerity. He is a runner, then sits in the sauna, he watches his cholesterol. He rarely drinks. No, he has never been one of those people others flock to, there has never been any admiring throng in his life, only his brother, a few close friends, his parents, his wife.

And Helen, perhaps. Romantic, penitent. Doing time for what sins, he doesn't know.

It is this thought which prompts him to try again. ‘There's nothing there,' he says. ‘That's the conundrum of the Antarctic. People love it, they are fascinated with it, but there's nothing there.'

Helen rallies to the thought. ‘It's like loving a ghost, then? Or a dead person?'

‘I suppose. Most people don't see the point of giving yourself with little expectation of getting anything in return. These people have no business setting foot in the Antarctic.'

‘You think it's misguided to ask for something back?'

‘People who think they should get something back, that you are somehow owed something in return for having given your heart – yes, I think that's misguided. Or childish, at least.'

‘Look at what happened to Scott. He loved the Antarctic, so he expected it to be on his side, and it killed him.'

‘He killed himself, more like it, I think,' David says. ‘It's a risk; if you love someone or something enough, you can die.'

The ship saws to the side, pitching her into David's shoulder.

‘I'm sorry,' he apologises. ‘This is all a bit heavy. Seeing Elephant Island always has this effect on me.'

‘That's all right.' She pauses. ‘I think it would be a sobering sight even if you weren't related to one of the survivors. I always thought, they must have been so relieved to have solid ground underneath their feet. Do you know that when they abandoned ship and formed what they called Ocean Camp, the ice-floe camp, Shackleton was so worried that the ice would give way at night, he ordered the dogs to sleep in their harnesses. He wrote down instructions on a piece of paper for what to do in case the ice broke up, and pinned it on every tent.'

‘No,' he says. ‘I didn't know that.'

‘I saw the notes,' Helen says. ‘In the Shackleton Institute. They have the originals.' The ink had faded to the colour of thin coffee, but she had been able to read them: muster point at the Boss' tent; leave everything; save dogs, socks, provisions. The cook goes into the boat first.

David realises this woman knows far, far more than she lets on – about the Antarctic, its history, even his ancestor's expedition, he supposes. She is an historian, after all, why wouldn't she? And yet she has listened to him, never saying, I know that already.

They say goodnight, unsteadily. As they make their way to their cabins the ship lurches underneath them, the stairs rushing up to greet them, then rushing away, so they are sliding down the handrails more than walking They crash into the walls on either sides of the corridor. A groaning sound fills the ship as the hull scrapes against ice.

Helen woke, four hours later, in the middle of the night.

A foggy light filtered through the porthole – she had forgotten to close the nightshade. Now that there was no more night she would need to draw it down in order to sleep. Her throat burned, and she regretted the whisky. The ship's air was very dry.

A chill shot through her. Helen said it aloud, then. What? An energy, very powerful, passed through her. As if she had been handed someone else's rage.

In the dusk light as she dressed, she saw – or thought she saw – shadows in the mirror. A pair of eyes that were not her eyes. Hair, longer, darker than her own. There was something about a camera, a flash – someone was taking photographs of herself in the mirror. But when? It wasn't happening now. And then a folding away, as if she had nudged open the edge of an envelope, only enough to see an outline of its contents, before it sealed itself again.

She was so shaken she had to sit down on the edge of her bunk. There was a shadow inside her, but it did not belong to her. It was a mocking, white, scalded rage. As if once released, it had never found anywhere to settle. All this time it had been looking for someone who was open to receiving it. She had never felt anything like it.

That night she spent on the bridge in the company of the Second Officer, who did not question her appearance on the darkened platform high above the ocean in the middle of the night. They sat together in an easy silence, watching the searchlights probe the dusk ahead of them for growlers, those near-invisible lumps of ice substantial enough to sink a ship, and which lurked just beneath the surface.

5

Nara and Alexander met across a dinner table at their hotel in the Falkland Islands, the same musty relic where Helen and David would stay one day in the shadowy rim of time we call the future.

She noticed him, not only for his looks, but because he stared at her. His stares were not searching, or teeming with interest, or even ordinarily judgemental. There was a dull, brutal quality to them, as if he were trying to decide what kind of treatment he would mete out. She stared right back, until he seemed to become aware of it, and averted his eyes.

The ship was delayed coming into port, and their group had several days to kill in the Falklands. They were all dazzled by the light, by daffodils in November, the seasons turned on their head, their sudden release from the encroaching northern hemisphere winter, at being tipped out at the bottom of the world into wafting clouds of yellow gorse.

The stern magic of the Islands astonished her. The capital, Stanley, had a Toytown charm with its white picket fences, its bright-coloured houses of painted corrugated iron. The sharpness of the white in the light, as if giant searchlights had been turned on overhead, setting up a pulsating beaming, ribbons of clouds in the sky, harried, windswept clouds – all this seemed familiar and exotic at once.

Nara and Alexander walked together out to the little airport where red Britten-Norman Islanders came and went, servicing outlying communities. There they found in the departure lounge a giant-scale map of the island. They looked at the jagged coastline, frayed and gouged with coves and fingers and islands brewing with sea lions.

They walked and talked, and she fell in with his long elliptical stride. There was something instantly familiar about his presence and spirit – it was even in his walk, the way his bones moved next to hers.

He talked easily about himself, without self-interest but with a willing spirit. She liked his lack of ceremony, and the bright alertness of his mind.

He told her he was from Devon. He had grown up in a large but not ostentatious house, an Aga in the kitchen, he said, with a fond irony – for his mother's predilections, or his class, or the conventionality of it all, she didn't know. He told her his father had been in the Army and that he was dead, killed in a mountain-climbing accident, and that the house was full of photographs of him. Every wall and every corner, he said, his voice wary and wry, like a shrine. Outside the shrine was a rose garden, not decorative but wild.

He was a glaciologist, travelling to the Antarctic on a post-doctoral fellowship. He would spend the winter of 2011–12 there to consolidate his research. Nara asked him what he might do, after the Antarctic, and he replied that he might want to take a job abroad, in Switzerland, or in the US; these were the two world leaders in glaciology. He said all this with a breezy complete optimism, so powerful that he began to take on a golden glow. There were people in the world like this, she knew – doors simply opened, as if on an electronic signal. These people would never know what it was like to scrape and scrape at brick walls until your fingers bled.

Alexander pointed into the sky. ‘Look, you can see Venus and Mars tonight.' Mars hung low in the sky, to the southwest, a reddish, ceramic hue. Venus shimmered bright, it threw many times the light of any other star.

There was no light to blur the stars, there was no other land, for thousands of miles. For a moment she thought the lights moving across the sky were planes. But it was only the beam of satellites, and drifting clouds of stars. This was an empty quarter of the planet. Punta Arenas and the tip of Argentina and Chile to the west, and to the east, only random specs: South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, until Cape Town. Planes from Chile to Australia crossed the Pacific. South Africa was thousands of miles to the east. No one flew over the Antarctic because there was nowhere to land, in an emergency.

‘I miss seeing the lights of planes in the sky. Here there's only the flight from Ascension,' she said.

‘Don't forget the military planes,' Alexander added. Every day, a dank roar ripped through the skies, so loud Nara felt her ears were being torn open. The sound travelled through her; she could even feel its tear in her heart.

They walked through clouds of perfumed gorse, past banks of lupines, past the church with its sculpture of the four giant ribs of whales. The night glowed with a strange undertone, like the dark red of overripe strawberries.

They had done no more than walk under rough skies harried by rigid southerly winds, like tearsheets of corrugated iron. They counted ten shipwrecks in the harbour, rusting in the peaty waters. They read the plaques that spelled out the stories of individual disaster. Ships run aground, or abandoned, long interludes of war, of isolation. The copper water lapped against their sides, rusted to the hue of ceramics. DEFENDER and ENDURANCE were spelled out in white stones across the harbour on dull hills. These were the names of ships which came to rescue and protect the islands in a time of war.