The Nature of Ice (28 page)

Bickerton—160 M West
Aeroplane broke down 10 M
             out

Madigan went 270 M East

Good luck from
Hodgman
Hurley
McLean

A. McLean

Possibilities swirled through his head. Twenty-one miles to Aladdin's Cave, another five to the hut—it would take him three, four days if the weather held. Would the ship wait? All parties safe! Wireless messages received! Those Hannam tapped out before the masts came down, night after night, with nothing in return? Amundsen's triumph at the pole—but what of Scott's return? For now he couldn't think. He didn't care. He was bursting with joy, intoxicated with gratitude and the exquisite sensation of ginger biscuit warming his gut, explosions of flavour as sweet and giddying as each glorious line of news on which he gorged.

A
MEMENTO

CHAD PAUSES AT THE BASE of the studio steps to gauge the cast of early morning light. The helicopter engineer ambles around the Squirrel, yawning as he kneels to release the clamp that tethers a blade. Chad contemplates the thudding in his chest, unsure if it comes from the knowledge he is leaving, or this other act, the offering in his hands positioning him, surely, for pity or silent ridicule.

The station still sleeps and he is glad to have left this deed for last, certain there will be no chance of an encounter now.

It seems odd and sad that he has not set foot inside her studio before. The dimness of the room makes him feel more of a trespasser, hushed into furtive steps. He places the gift on her chair then shifts it to the desk. He studies how it looks then returns it to the chair. The urge to linger, to savour, to look around, staves off his compulsion to bolt.

Stacked along the shelves are countless numbered and dated film canisters, beside them spindles of DVD s. Atop an old steel cabinet lies a hand-embroidered cloth, upon it mementoes from their field trips: snow petrel and skua feathers, an adélie tail quill, a strip of weathered elephant seal hide from the wallow, a collection of pebbles and stones—among them the garnet rock he so self-righteously declined. He wills himself to believe she will leave it at the station, on neutral ground, like her books from the library: articles on loan.

Bolder now, he takes up a hinged photo frame from her desk. On one side is a woman remarkably like Freya except for hair coloured golden and spiked with darker tips. The face looks unfinished without its spread of wine. Draped across the woman's lap, a teenage girl reclines in a theatrical pose. Chad turns the perspex frame to a portrait of an older woman with porcelain skin, her silver hair swept into a roll. Beside it, in the saturated colours of old Kodak prints from his parents' family album, is a younger version of the same woman; the man beside her, fair-haired, slight in build, stands pointing at the nameplate of a ship—
Fram—
Amundsen's ship.

The last photograph smarts. He holds the frame to the light, driven to measure this other man's face. Older than he'd imagined, her husband looks studious with rimless glasses and a mild face, a city man in his collared shirt and jacket. Chad's eyes are drawn to the remarkable fineness of his hand placed on Freya's shoulder, comparing the man's unblemished skin with the coarseness of his own—nails ragged, thumbnail black, knuckles wide and knocked about. He returns the frame to the desk, despondent at the ocean of difference between them, his gloom deepened by Freya facing him in the photo: the admiration in her gaze.

Chad uncovers a photograph lying on the bench and feels a jolt to see a black and white portrait of himself. Not a shred of sophistication in sight, more your good-for-nothing loafer leaning back on his bike in a govvie-issue wool shirt, arms propped behind his head, grinning like a galah. Beneath this image lies a second, smaller print of Freya, photographed by him despite her protests. He feels poignant pleasure in the portrait, at the joy in her face, alive and intense.

Chad hears the rotors whine, the silence of the station broken by a whirring that quickly heightens to a squeal. The studio floor hums. Only now does it dawn on him that Freya works hours on end with this ear-piercing scream penetrating body and mind. Little wonder that at nights, once the whirligigs are laid to rest, he sees her studio lit up; if he stares long enough he will catch her shape moving past the glass.

Five-fifteen. He peels a post-it from the pad and scratches a note. BIRD'S EYE HUON PINE. A MEMENTO OF YOUR SUMMER IN THE VESTFOLDS. He moves the gift back to the desk and places the note alongside.

Chad opens the studio door, one foot on the threshold, his helicopter shuttle to the skiway shrieking its readiness to leave. His feet refuse to work, held fast with indecision, lured by desire for something not rightfully his. He returns inside, closes the door, his pulse quickening with this final act of stealth. He takes the portrait of Freya, working quickly to roll it up tightly, scrabbling through the top drawer of her desk to find an elastic band.

He turns at a sound: Freya stands framed in the open doorway. The sorrow in her eyes—
Look at you
, they might be saying,
no better than a thief
.

‘I've been searching the station for you.'

‘You found me. Red-handed.' He holds out the portrait.

She shrugs. ‘It's yours if you want it. You took the photo.'

She closes the door, the pitch of the rotors still ringing in his ears.

‘Adam told me you were leaving. Not even goodbye?'

He shakes his head, afraid to speak, his focus on the wall, on a line of loose and missing studs.

‘I didn't want this, Chad. I didn't want you to go.'

‘It's no big deal,' he says. ‘I'm looking forward to a change of scenery.'

‘No big deal? It meant nothing?'

That wasn't what he said. The walls shudder as the second helicopter fires up. ‘You're the one that changed your mind, Freya. Overnight. I'd just like you to have told me why.'

‘This.' She holds out her ring finger. ‘Because of this.'

‘You said you didn't want to go home.' He raises his voice above the second engine. ‘One night with me and you change your mind?'

‘It wasn't like that. Everything happened so quickly. It scared me, Chad. When I get home I have a lot to talk over with Marcus. Whatever the outcome, I want it to be for the right reasons. Nothing between Marcus and me has anything to do with you.'

‘I was more of a diversion, eh. A fling to tide you over. Did you ever stop to consider how I might feel?'

‘Nothing like this has happened to me before. You have to believe that. I need some time and space to get things worked out in my own head. When a person is married, it's not so simple.'

‘Call me naive, but I think it is simple, Freya. I know nothing about your marriage or your husband, but I've got to know something about you and you don't strike me as anybody's prisoner. It might not be easy, but you're as free to make your own choices as the rest of us. The way I see it, the only person holding you back is you.'

‘What about you?' she shouts above the duelling rotors. ‘You're so sure of yourself. What would you have happen?'

He wants it all. The whole unattainable, happy-ever-after bundle. ‘There's a chopper downstairs screaming for me to get in it. It's too late to be asking now.'

He moves past her, pulls on his gloves, has his hand upon the door.

‘So that's it, Chad? You're running away?'

‘That's it,' he says. ‘I'm bailing.'

He steps onto the landing, the blades of the chopper a blur. He takes a last look back, ‘Call it self-preservation,' and shuts the door.

FREYA STANDS AT HER STUDIO window, the drone of the helicopter reduced to an echo, the speck on the horizon disappearing into sky. She returns to the desk, noticing the parcel wrapped in cloth, and her photo frame that no longer sits as she left it. For a moment she considers ignoring the parcel, leaving it unopened, refusing to take part in this final act of severance.

She unties the lashing and the cloth falls away. Freya turns the snow petrel in her hands, studying the curve of wings tucked close, absorbing every feathered line, running her hand over the glassy finish of the pine. His hands inhabit every ridge and line. She holds the bird to her cheek, remembering the first snow petrel she saw nestled beneath rocks at Bandits Hut, how she'd imagined then cupping the fragile creature in her hands.

She sets the carving down, presses her fingers across the ridges of her breastbone and listens to her heart.
Thud
.
Thud
.
Thud
. Only the feel of his presence lingers in the room. She drags her fingers across her blemished cheek and throat. Her mark of birth never was a blessing; it never was a charm. She has spent her life trapped beneath a glacier, searching for a way out, led and misled by refractions in the ice. The darkroom and camera, the college where she first met Marcus—an admiration she once mistook for love: all paths in search of light.

After that single, sorry night of marital separation, she dutifully returned home from the refuge of her parents' to a man wretched with despair; his manic talk, his threats of doing harm to himself, have haunted her since.
Everything can be
exactly as it was
, he begged, when all the while it was she who had turned unannounced and changed direction, she who craved for more. Flowers, cards of eloquent devotion:
she
had reduced her husband—through her guilt and pity—to a man with a suffocating need to please. An untenable storm of turmoil and uncertainty that abated with a
please don't leave
me
, the simplest and saddest of words that finally wound her in.
Alright, Marcus
. She didn't give her promise lightly.

She passes the snow petrel between her hands, raises it to breathe in the perfume of wood, to feel its loveliness sensuous against her cheek. She winds the cotton wrap around sorrow and regret and all that she can never have and places the carving deep inside the drawer.

>> Freya, I've been thinking things through these last weeks. I am so very sorry for the way I spoke to you on the phone on Christmas Day. You have every right to still be upset, but please, don't cut me out. You reply to my emails, but it seems a long time since I felt something from you. I don't know what else to say to make things right again.

If nothing else, work on the exhibition moves forward at a good pace. Hurley's Fury-lashed waters of Commonwealth Bay gives a glimpse of the conditions that Aurora encountered on her return in January 1913. Captain Davis spent weeks battling the weather, searching up and down the coastline. He not only had Mawson's missing party to worry about, but the safety of Frank Wild and his men, who were 1500 miles west along the coast, their hut built upon a floating ice shelf. Joe Laseron, the biological collector, conveys the mood at winter quarters in his journal.

This is 2.30 a.m., and perhaps the last night I shall spend in Adélie Land. For the last week every night was to have been the last, but we are still here. The same old stove in front, the same old corner where the nightwatchman sits and reads—or thinks maybe—be it for the last time. I feel unutterably homesick—home and the green trees and sunshine and the little water. The same old bunks are occupied by the same old chaps, that is nearly all—but there are three vacant. The poor old chief—we loved him with all his faults, Ninnis, cherub as we called him, and X whose Swiss heart was one of gold, are up on the plateau somewhere. Oh that awful plateau, blizzard ridden, treacherous, the most desolate, cruellest region in the world. January has entirely gone, and winter is practically on the land again . . .

Fury-lashed waters of
Commonwealth Bay

Aladdin's Cave II

8 February 1913

WOULD THE SHIP WAIT? DOUGLAS had taken to sitting outside Aladdin's Cave huddled like a child with his back to the wind, waiting for a lull. He weighed up the likelihood he was strong enough to stop the sledge from hurtling downhill and toppling over in a sixty-mile-an-hour wind against the unthinkable gamble of severing his lifeline to shelter and going down alone, leaving the sledge behind. With good crampons he might make the five miles to the hut in a single march, but he had only a miserable pair fashioned from a packing box with nails that cut into his feet; they, and he, would give out in the first five hundred yards.

He'd spent a week eating and sleeping in a cave whose walls no longer sparkled with magic but had blackened with smoke and soot from boil-ups of ground plasmon biscuit and glaxo milk powder. He had eaten chunks of pemmican straight from the tin. Two oranges and a pineapple whose verdant scent had filled the cave on his arrival, and spoke of
Aurora
's return, did more to upset than bolster his constitution. Diarrhoea, blood spouting from his nostril and a watery concoction bursting from his fingertips set him questioning whether he had scurvy, or if stale supplies were doing him lasting harm.