The Ice Lovers (33 page)

There is the dead, and the living, and what between them? Dusk. A collusion. That is why, in this duskless place, life seems unreal. There are no ghosts. So we haunt ourselves, having no one else to do the haunting for us.

Nara wrote in fragments, mostly. Many of them make little sense: I hear it now. The voice. It says: Moss hours. Our confessions.

But it is clear she thought she was reading the planet, as if it were writing its diaries or memoirs, and had simply arrived at the last chapter. Too exhausted to write on its own, now, it required an amanuensis – a translator, a scribe. Why had it chosen her? She was at the end of the earth, alone and grappling with an impossible love. The Antarctic winter had driven many strong-minded men insane, and why should a young woman biologist not succumb to the hallucinations of the most total winter on earth? She has been abandoned – that much she understood. She needed a voice to fill the silence.

Now, Helen wonders: is it possible she was telling the truth? It was a radical thought, but perhaps it has a voice, and was trying to communicate, in its distress, and it found a willing receptor tuned by anguish to its frequency.

At night in her pitroom, Helen tries to tune herself into its voice, but she can only hear the hiss of snow, the hollow ringing wind, a sound like no other on earth. Black with emptiness, and also something else, if Helen allows herself to be fanciful: despite its ferocity, a quiet kind of sorrow. A longing.

The Wintering file stops on the night before the Berkner trip. Nara must have been in a rush, Helen decides: all she had had time to write was ‘tomorrow – Berkner trip with Luke. Leave base at 0800, refuel at Bluefields, then Berkner.'

The old maps of the Antarctic show endless archipelagoes of islands, ice caps draped across their vacant names: Lassiter, Wilkins, Sweeny, Charcot – all men, all long departed. Men of the desert, of the hollow places, glass, crystals, following a parallel code through time. They were famous, they had charted the world Helen occupies now, and that was about it. They moved across this transparent world where there is no lightning, customs, music, where water has never flowed, except as ice.

Nara had confided to her diary that she had reached a dead end with men. Why then, Helen wonders, did she volunteer to go to a place so suffused with men, their presence, their exploits, their pasts and deaths? These men had marched across the polar ice caps in pure summer, the sun pounding them from above. Hel-lo there, she could imagine them saying, in their sharp Edwardian diction, as if swords were being driven through their words. They had been here, in this ghostless chalice of the world, a hundred years ago.

For the first time in her life, in the Antarctic Helen feels a true kinship with men, in particular with the old explorers, also long dead, and also something more mysterious: it is if she can feel the remnants of forgotten life, a life she has lived, that definitely existed, but which she cannot remember. All that is left is the residual impression of having been given a formal gift: of passion for cold, for this frozen world, its flaxen, diligent light.

In her office, the same one Helen occupies now, did Nara ever have such thoughts? There, beside Helen, although separated from time, Nara plays with the plastic bull from the wine bottle, the last one she shared with Luke before his departure, turning it over and over in her hands so much she will wear a groove in it. Objects you keep, without knowing why.

2

On a night not long before Luke flew out at the beginning of the Antarctic winter of 2016, Helen took a walk to the aircraft hangar. She did not have her mini-disc recorder with her. She had no hopes of encountering Luke, or if she did, of speaking to him.

She pulled the hangar door open and stepped inside. There in the half-light sat the large interncontinental plane. It gleamed, a deep satisfying red in the semi-darkness. She walked around it, running her hands along the fuselage, passing her fingers over the penguins-and-propellers emblem, feeling its rivets, its seams. It was surprisingly delicate, this machine which could land on an ice runway with wheels, which could fly five hours through the air, back to the real world.

‘Thinking about stowing away?'

She started. Luke emerged from the fuselage. ‘Didn't give you a scare, did I?'

‘You did,' she said. ‘I didn't think anyone was here.'

He saw her hand lingering on the fuselage. ‘She's a great plane, isn't she?'

She took a step back.

‘Don't go.' There was a plaintive note in his voice which surprised her.

‘I'm cold.'

‘I'll make you a cup of tea. Here, come round to the Portakabin.'

She sat down, amidst the dustless books. The flying manuals were still on the shelf. An atlas lay open in front of her to show the Alps. Helen had read Nara's account of the nights she had sat there with Luke, drinking Bailey's, the things they had talked about. She stepped inside with Luke, into an air of regret. She had an impression, fleeting and not entirely fanciful, that something or someone followed at her heels.

He saw her looking at the atlas. ‘Planning my summer holiday,' he said. ‘That's if I ever get one. I think I might be spending the rest of the winter in the Falklands. And you, you're staying here.'

‘Well, as everyone keeps saying, how many people get an enforced winter in the Antarctic?'

‘That's true,' he said. ‘When you become a winterer, it's like joining the Special Forces. You enter into an élite.'

They sat in silence for a while. When she finally asked the question, it was on impulse, not at all premeditated.

‘Did anything happen between you on that trip to Berkner? There was a mention in the report that you'd had some trouble with the aircraft there, that you'd had to take it airborne to see how it flew? You reported your position to Midas base and that Nara wasn't with you.'

For a moment, Luke was silent. ‘There was nothing wrong with the plane. I just flew off.'

‘Flew off?'

He looked at her, and in his eye was an open expression, without a hint of challenge.‘Something just came over me. I couldn't have done anything else. It was an instinct, a reflex. I didn't know I was going to do it. Do you think it would have made any difference if I had?'

She looked at him. Luke was a thinking man, she understood, not a dumb brute. If he could do such a thing, then anyone could.

Helen suspected that our deepest natures, our real selves – if such a thing could be said to exist – have their expression in these momentary firings. She wondered if it could be true, that we were all driven by sparks toward conquest, abandonment, the many gradations between the two. These were only the same rank sparks that drove animals into hibernation, impossible migrations. Knit together, these sparks write the code to our existences.

And Luke, in that moment in the Portakabin, with the stranger in front of him who had come to write Nara's story; he also remembered those nights drinking Bailey's, looking at maps, talking about Rio de Janeiro, Senegal, the Canary Islands. For years after the accident he had been coming back to this base, to the hangar and his makeshift office, unaware he was returning as a ghost.

For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Luke had read this in one of the books left behind on base by a scientist, a book about theoretical physics. Much of it was beyond him, but this basic principle made sense: that everything we do in the world carries the energy of its own riposte.

He did not know why he'd flown off without her that day at Berkner, only to turn around in the sky well short of Midas and return. Sometimes there is no why. This is what he would come to think, in the ensuing years. It was an instinct – curious, inexplicable. Neither in nor out of character; in any case Luke was not convinced that there was such a thing as character, as in a suite of things one individual would or would not do.

He would wait four years before anyone would ask him the question, before the woman journalist or historian or writer – whatever she was – would come to base and ask him why? Not why had the crash happened, the question posed by everyone else in the interim, by HQ, the Chief Pilot, the Coroner, the FCO man. But why had he left Nara at Berkner alone for four hours; not long, but long enough perhaps to provoke some sort of breakdown.

His favourite moment is when the wheels leave the ground; that precise moment when thrust and lift collude against gravity, the moment when he is uplifted. And what of the people left behind? The woman writer would ask this: he could tell she was a friend of the underdog, of the person left behind by history, of the person standing on the runway in the snow and the sudden bitter wind, watching the plane depart.

Now that he is ready to leave the Antarctic forever, he can admit it. He wanted Nara only as a secret. If they had been lovers, he might have become bored with her, then spurned her. It took three years for the thought to occur to him: might Nara have understood that would be the outcome, and knowing she could not bear it, would not go near him at all?

And his love for the ice desert, what has happened to it? The white vortex of passion he had once felt was muted to ordinary awe now: awe at its frigid glamour. You couldn't call that love.

The Antarctic, that half-invented desert. Could it exist? But he saw it, every day, passing beneath his plane. He, more than any of them, knew it was real.

The rescue team searched for Nara for ten hours, until they too were in danger of becoming trapped on the sea ice. The inquest, held the following year in the Falklands, concluded that she had very likely been concussed in the crash. On regaining consciouness she had become confused and disoriented. Nara had probably headed off in the direction of base; she knew how close they were to home. If she had been thinking straight she would have known to stay with the plane rather than take the risk of walking across twenty kilometres of disintegrating sea ice. But no one would know for certain what choices Nara made, because her body was never found.

The one who comes looking for you is the one who loves you. Only this person can rescue you from your own loss. Of all the people who pored over Nara's death – the base commander, the coroner, Nara's parents, lawyers, insurers, distant officials in distant rooms lined with green leather furniture and bound volumes of legal tomes, even David himself, looking for legalities, loopholes, exclusion clauses – only Helen would accept that Nara may have walked away over the ice not for rescue, but to embrace death. Only Helen would think about how it takes so much cold and fright to pluck a body out of the world, even one as slight as Nara's, or might be awestruck at how long she survived, and at how much she missed him, the man in the plane, only two, three kilometres from where she stood now, but there was no going back, because the ice had broken up behind her, and what had been a puzzle of pancake floes was now open water, and she was drifting on the ice, out to the Bellingshausen.

Helen would come to know that people who have not been to the Antarctic do not understand. No ships will rescue you, no helicopter will swoop low. Here there is only a violent, intimate solitude, and the white sweep of time on the horizon. This place so ravaged and Spartan and raw that it might actually be holy.

On base, during one of their late-night conversations that winter, David would tell Helen, ‘I never thought about Nara's death. I never considered what she endured. It was just an accident, and incident. A story.'

As an FCO official he countersigned the Falkland Island coroner's verdict of death by misadventure. Her body was never found. No one knew how she died; whether her abandonment of the plane was deliberate, or whether she was concussed and disoriented. She may have tried to swim for it. She may have been killed by a leopard seal, or a killer whale, the nemesis of the old explorers. Or perhaps she stayed on the ice, in the hope that it would deliver her to land.

In any case, the area was vast, the tide could have taken her anywhere. Men (and until Nara they had always been men – she was the first woman to die this way in the Antarctic) lost on sea ice were almost never found, although mariners on early explorations had spoken of being haunted by men's faces looking up from the icy waters, or staring at them from within an iceberg. The body must be somewhere, the old mariners reasoned, entombed either in the icy depths, or ground through the ice sheets. But the continent rarely gave up its dead. It ate people whole. They disappeared without a trace.

As he told her all this, Helen said nothing, only looked out the window. She saw a dark night, a glacier shining silver in the moonlight. A cold place.

3

The glassy air of early morning was unzipped by flares. It was ten-thirty and still dark. To the northeast, the sky plumed with light – the glimmer of the short-lived Antarctic day.

The ship pulled away and the flares were flames of red burn igniting darkness. Water frothed where the thrusters worked, and the red was reflected in its inky silk. The metallic groan increased, and the ship turned on its haunches, spinning delicately around to face Adélie Island.

Their enforced winter had ended two weeks before, with the news of the lifting of travel restrictions. Thermometers dropped into the waters of the bay from RIBs showed a surface temperature of –1.5 degrees; the sea froze at two degrees below zero. A decision was taken, to send in the Navy icebreaker, because the supply ship, the Astrolabe, was only ice-strenghtened and not an icebreaker, and if the ice locked around the continent sudden and hard, as it often did in the beginning of winter, the ship would be stuck.

Satellite images showed the pack ice moving north from Pine Island Bay. For a week they had stayed tuned to the internet site which showed the icebreaker's progress, expecting to hear at any moment that the pack had drifted north, encircling the Navy ship, and they would not be going home. But one night in June a giant arrived in their midst; it heaved and hurled itself against the wharf on a suddenly powerful swell called the Bellingshausen gyre, a current that picked up speed when the ice was near.