A Victim of the Aurora (14 page)

Not saying anything, I sauntered to the library shelves by the darkroom and took down the two volumes of Holbrooke's expeditionary journal. Barry followed and looked over my shoulder as I turned the pages, seeking photographs of Forbes and Chalmers. First we saw them posed in a group on the expeditionary ship. Chalmers perhaps 24 years old, dark hair parted in the middle, long-mouthed, smooth, an assistant geologist. Afterwards, his mother had publicly denounced Holbrooke for losing her son in Antarctica. I remembered how she picketed Holbrooke's testimonial dinner and public lectures, making (to her credit) more noise than the combined motherhood of the world would during the Great War.

Forbes was an older man, perhaps 32, already balding. You noticed his strong throat, standing out from his sweater like a tree trunk. Holbrooke, in speaking their obituary, said they were good friends and bunkmates. Forbes was chief geologist, a position held in our expedition by Fields himself.

We turned up other photographs of the two geologists and studied them, as if we could find the ice warren of the one or both of them just from the contours of their faces.

Holbrooke had mourned them and written his stylish obituaries. His imagery was better than Stewart's. When he at last sent a search party, the autumn blizzards very nearly got them as well.

‘Poor sod,' Barry said.

‘Which one?'

‘Whichever one it is.'

‘Could it be both?'

‘It couldn't be both.' Barry hit the bookshelf over and over with his index finger, pulsing out the reasoning. ‘It couldn't be both because they couldn't both be mad in identical ways. Now if there were two, one of them would have been on the ice-foot, waving and bloody cheering when we landed. If there were two, one of them would have wanted to live in the luxury of Holbrooke's hut. No, I tell you, it takes one fellow to be mad enough to live in an ice hole and push Victor instead of greeting him.'

I exclaimed in the accustomed way about how unlikely it all was, an encounter between Victor and Forbes-Chalmers, in the middle of a blizzard. It was all I could say. For Walter O'Reilly's comic evidence had roused in me a desire, a positive taste, for Forbes-Chalmers's existence. In the end I yielded.

‘Barry?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'll look with you. For the man, I mean.'

‘When?'

‘Tomorrow, if the light's good.'

‘I have to do some work in the morning. An article on the geology of the dry valleys, as it happens. If we find Forbes-Chalmers in the afternoon, he might be able to help me with it.'

‘Please, go in the morning.'

‘Bloody artists. Painting bloody nudes at irregular hours and complaining about the bloody artistic onus. I can't go in the morning.'

‘All right, then.'

He laughed at me. ‘My guess,' he said, ‘is that he's among the hillocks along the north edge of the Barne. Close enough to raid and observe us. Close enough to the shore for hunting. Yet far enough away for the kind of weird privacy the man seems to want. I'd say an ice bank sheltered from the south. Now, it will involve a lot of looking …'

But I was already feeling exuberant. A few miles up the Barne were a finite series of promontories sheltering a finite number of snow-banks. Searching them was a task of mere human proportions.

Barry went back to his little desk in the laboratory and I put Holbrooke's two volumes back on the shelf. I was about to turn away and try to spend the day's scrag end at my easel. But there was an unusual flash of colour amongst the staid bindings. It was a book of scarlet backing and, when I drew it out, marbled cover. It was entitled in gold,
The Journalist's Yearbook, Gazetteer and Diary, 1909
.

My brain jangled in my head like one of those little bells that are rung when you want the dishes cleared. For it seemed to me that the crime was making terrible impositions on reality. It had taken advantage of the mention of Forbes-Chalmers to make Forbes-Chalmers real. Now it had taken advantage of the mention of the journal and made the journal real, incarnating it on a familiar bookshelf.

I knew before the yearbook opened whose name I would find inside. In fact, I found an inscription.
To Victor from A.H.C. Xmas 1908. Keep your deadliest secrets in here
. The opening pages were full of the normal yearbook rubbish … weights, measures, prizes for journalism and their winners, the names, addresses and editors of all the major newspapers and journals in the British Isles. In my shock, I read a few pages of this handy information. I still remember that the political editor of
The Glasgow Herald
was a Mr Fergus Ogg.

Before I had leafed these pages and had even seen a word of Victor's writing, I knew it would be a nightmare book. What it would do would be to show me that my colleagues were nearly as weak and liable to craziness as Anthony Piers was, and that therefore the world was much more dangerous than I had ever thought.

The page marked Jan 1 bore four words.
Sir Eugene Stewart
…
See later entry re: Lady Stewart
. There was nothing written on the Jan 2 page, but on Jan 3 began more explicit charges against Alec Dryden.
In October 1900, Captain Arnold Jeffrey, Dr Dryden's brother-in-law, a former officer of the Cape Colony Police and a squadron commander in the Bush Veldt Carabiniers, was wounded in the side during an engagement at Tielerfontein in the Orange Free State. The wound and its treatment were so severe, including cauterizing the injury with molten mercury, that Captain Jeffrey had to be administered dangerous doses of morphine. In 1903, not long before Dr Dryden's departure on the first Stewart Antarctic expedition, Captain Jeffrey, then a wraith-like guest at Dr Dryden's home in Devon, stole from the Dr's surgery and administered to himself four grains of morphine. Dr Dryden was persuaded by his wife and by a friend of Captain Jeffrey's to write a death certificate for heart failure. My unwitting source in this matter is Captain Walter Styles, the friend who urged, and approved of, Dr Dryden's unethical action
.

There's no need to tell you I began to sweat. The exactness of the information … ‘near Tielerfontein', ‘four grains of morphine'. The naming of sources. It made treachery seem an exact science.

My fingers were cold and stupid as I turned the pages, knowing that, if he was exact about me, then he was exact about Dryden. Thumbing, I saw that someone's entry, comprising three pages, had been ripped out. I didn't know whose, for if the notes following Sir Eugene's and Alec's were in order, I couldn't see what the order was. At last, on the pages of May, I found my crime set down.

In 1908, at a dinner at Brenton's, the gallery-owner and restaurateur, Anthony Piers was seated beside Lady Anthea Hurley, wife of the Anglo-Irish lawyer Sir Oscar Hurley, KC. The results of this juxtaposition are amply provided by a gaggle of society gossips
.

The results of this juxtaposition …

I remembered the dinner and the happy lottery of seating that put me beside Anthea. When she laughed I had the strange impression that she was seventeen and was glissading up and down the scales of time. Yet her face was also sensual, so that I instantly and deliciously wondered what it would look like in the extremes of love-making.

She was a wonderful talker and Brenton put her opposite me because she went every year to the showing of the Paris Salon and had just been and could tell me about it.

When you remember such women you know that even now, in a Laguna Hills nursing home for decaying plutocrats, you are still in love with them. And the nausea felt on seeing her name in Victor's journal … it was for her, because she was honest and vulnerable. It wasn't a matter of a wink and a feel-up under the table. I was too young and bedazzled for that, and she was too poised and dazzling a woman. The day after the dinner I wrote her an infatuated letter but I never posted it.

It was a second accidental meeting that initiated the affair. A Bond St gallery on a wet Tuesday afternoon. Fortunately uncrowded. I followed her from painting to painting, chattering stupidly, and in the alcoves I couldn't stop myself touching her.

Lady Hurley and Anthony Piers continued an adulterous liaison for ten weeks. At least two evenings a week she visited the artist's lodgings in Warwick Gardens off Kensington High Street. Mrs Alise Bailey, housekeeper at No. 47 Warwick Gardens, opposite the artist's lodgings, had employed Sir Oscar Hurley in an unsuccessful inheritance case and therefore recognized Lady Hurley and kept note of her arrivals and departures. Piers and Lady Hurley also spent some week-ends at the Clarion Hotel in Norwich, registering separately and taking adjoining rooms …

‘Is that room on the western end free?' I used to ask the clerk. ‘The one with the view of the cathedral.' As if I had come to Norwich for the architecture.

Sir Oscar was fifty-seven years old and I was twenty-three. If Freudian hypotheses had been popular then I might have asked myself if in making love to Sir Oscar's wife I was trying to kill my father. As it was, I had a simple arrogant certainty that Anthea would marry me. When I mentioned it, the affair ended. ‘You can fall in love again,' she said, ‘but I am Oscar's last love.' She also said something I thought was barbarous at the time. ‘Marriage isn't a matter of desire. It's a matter of placid companionability.' As I begged and raged she promised that I'd be in and out of love at least two times before Christmas.

She was right in spirit, although the Antarctic enterprise arose and forestalled any sustained liaison. Just the same, even in this senile house so far from the
Clarion
in Norwich in that Edwardian spring, I know that I love her and could have married her, and that our marriage would have had a lot to do with desire.

Admittedly, I was always easily infatuated. I realize with a little amazement that the blonde and tanned Californian nurses, lusty girls, warn each other about me. One of them once called me a randy old notoriety. My sexuality, which in the
Clarion
was a divine distillation, is now an antediluvian joke for geriatric nurses.

That aside, I wanted the entries explained away by someone older, someone fatherly. Yet as I watched Sir Eugene writing in his alcove tears came to my eyes. I saw he had to be protected as you might protect a parent. I saw the greying hair, the keen tilt of the head, the baggy cardigan. I saw the cracked suitcase with its yellowed luggage tags. He could have been a failed accountant, a sacked schoolmaster, writing his apologia in some doss-house, hopelessly expecting some redressing justice. I couldn't tolerate the idea of him reading my entry, and the words at the head of the book:
Sir Eugene Stewart. See later entry re: Lady Stewart
.

Carrying the journal, I rushed away across the hut in case my tears became obvious. I might try to burn it immediately, but people would notice if you put a whole book into the stove. I might bury it in a snow-bank but then I wouldn't know what Victor had against the others and I wanted to know it all, not just as a key to the crime but because I needed, to adjust to my new despair, to know the scope of my brothers' culpability.

Huddled on my bunk, I searched the journal, looking for that later entry Victor had promised on page 1. Names, familiar and strange, cluttered the pages. The quiet and circumstantial accusations dazed me. But I couldn't find a word about Lady Stewart, and decided that she must have featured in the pages which someone had torn out. I trembled, thankful to the someone for this mercy.

And what someone had already done in mercy, I could do also. I could strip out the pages of my entry and Alec's. I had my hands already on the pages concerning Anthea and myself. My thumb was already clamped against Victor's rapid handwriting when I understood the many reasons why I could not do it. Could I pretend that some previous handler had done the ripping? In my loneliness, I wanted the closeness to Alec that mutual knowledge of our crimes would bring. I felt repugnance to reading the journal secretly and alone, without Alec's decency to provide me with rails.

I didn't know where Alec was. His unoccupied desk, his bed, his mummified seal stood only a few feet from the shelves. I found him sitting alone in the workshop. He contemplated a heap of food which stood on a square of sailcloth on the floor. Some pounds of pemmican, the dehydrated meat which boiled up into a fine stew we called ‘hoosh'. A few pounds of rice, canisters of Huntley and Palmer biscuit. Hardtack. It blended well with a pemmican stew and gave it body and protein. Two pounds of butter. Two pounds of tea. Two pounds of sugar. The classic diet of Antarctic expeditions, inadequate according to most modern dieticians. Alec, unblessed with the more advanced dietary notions of this age, sat pondering the balance between the items, the proportion of biscuit to pemmican and pemmican to rice, a finite ratio that guaranteed survival.

The proportions which would receive a rough testing on our egg journey had already been argued at length by John Troy and Alec himself. Soon, if the egg journey was to take place, Alec would have to stop pondering and tell Henson, ‘That's it, Sails!' And Henson would sew the supplies up in sailcloth containers, each one (hopefully) sufficient to sustain a party of three men for a week of sled-hauling. We would carry four such containers, caching one behind Mount Terror for the return journey.

‘Alec?'

‘Hello.'

‘Alec, this is going to be embarrassing. I've found Victor's journal.'

‘Good.' He stood slowly, knocked out his pipe against the edge of the bench.

‘Someone's entry has been ripped out. Not by me.'

‘Sir Eugene? Have you told Sir Eugene?'

‘No.'

‘May I see the book?'

I didn't hand it to him, though I already felt more at ease. ‘There's something in there about Captain Jeffrey.'

He closed his eyes. ‘Is there?'

‘There's also something about Lady Anthea – about a lady and myself. For the purposes of this conversation, it happens to be the truth.'