A Victim of the Aurora (20 page)

‘Of course, it wasn't the Mulroys who hurt Victor. They had no community of purpose. While Victor maintained the relationship with Bernard, Percy had cause to punish him but Bernard did not. When Victor terminated the relationship Bernard had cause but then it was Percy that didn't …'

I groaned from my place on the bed. I felt irrationally as if Sir Eugene had insulted the gift we had brought him that afternoon – the palpable refuse of Forbes-Chalmers.

I said, ‘Please. We know what happened now. We don't have to go on looking everywhere for motivations amongst ourselves.'

Sir Eugene did his impassive thinking for a second, his eyes closed. No wonder, I thought at that time, Lady Stewart went looking for something more volatile. ‘No. It's too big a leap. What you are doing is saying that because Forbes-Chalmers exists, as he does, he is mad, and because he is mad, he throttled Victor. There are gaps between all those propositions and naked hope, I'm afraid, Tony, will not span them.'

I stared at him for his eyes had opened now. I thought he was being perverse. I looked at Alec.

‘Of course Sir Eugene's right,' said Alec.

It annoyed me that they were both behaving like logic tutors, when I could tell with the pores of my skin that Forbes-Chalmers had finished Victor that crazy way.

‘We'll bring you Forbes-Chalmers,' I said. ‘We'll find him and get his confidence and bring him here. And he can tell you himself.'

‘I hope you do, Tony,' Sir Eugene assured me. ‘In the meantime we should consider who might be Victor's new friend.'

‘These people,' said Alec, meaning homosexuals, ‘move with amazing secrecy. I suppose that's something the rest of society has enforced on them.'

But none of us, not even Alec, had the expertise required for spotting new alliances of that nature.

If you are to understand the egg journey and even the expedition in general, I shall have to draw you a few rough maps. You see, where we were – on Cape Frye in McMurdo Sound – was by definition an island called Ross Island after Sir James Clark Ross who discovered the sound some time in 1841.

Here is the first rough map.

The mountain marked 1 is Erebus. 2 is Terror, 3 is Bird. Both the latter are extinct volcanoes. 4 is Cape Crozier, where the Emperor Penguins hatch their eggs in the infernal cold. The cross-hatched area? Well, let us open up a little.

The cross-hatched area is a great fixed bay of fast ice, fed continually by glaciers flowing from the high polar plateau. The glaciers are represented here as crude ladders, for the plateau is very high. The South Pole itself is 10,000 feet above the level of the sea and when, in my status as living fossil, the American navy flew me there ten years ago, I suffered severe nausea and giddiness from the altitude. I suppose I may have been suffering the shock too of reaching the Pole, that trigonometrical siren of the Edwardian age, to find it an ice-plain without character, staffed by disconsolate young sailors who would rather have been in Vietnam. In other words, the Pole was no longer a mythic place. That aside. The fixed bay of ice that welds Ross Island (and in the Cape Frye days welded us) to the great body of Antarctica is somewhat larger than France. The ice shelf was what those classic McMurdo Sound expeditions called it, and the name stuck. If you went to the Pole, you had to cross it, using manpower, dogs, ponies, and laying depôts as you went, depôts stocked with food and paraffin oil you could use on your way back. Sometimes hills and mountains (nunataks was the name explorers gave them, and who was I to argue?) stuck up out of the ice barrier, but mainly it was featureless and flat. Nonetheless, the winds cut ice waves in it, ridges running south-norm, so that it was sometimes hard to prevent sleds falling over side-ways as you travelled towards the glaciers and the Pole.

The most direct glacier route from Cape Frye was up the Beardmore Glacier, marked more heavily than the others on my elegant map. Ice fall, ice Amazon, it figured in all the agonies of Shackleton and Scott and Stewart, and totally defeated Holbrooke.

To return to the smaller enterprise of the egg journey. You can see that our route was around the back of Ross Island, across the hind slopes of Bird and Terror to the rookery. Only 82 miles. But crevassed with the ice rivers Bird and Terror themselves bred; with volcanoes on one side of us and the ice-shelf funnelling the sharper winds to us on the other. In a pitted valley where, against the wind and the wildly-seamed surface, we would have to be happy some days to make a mile and on others to sit, knees up, in our tent while all the ice accumulated in our clothing melted in the flesh-warmth of our sleeping bags; our skin climate itchy, clammy, enervating. And, hanging from the tent peak, our finnesköe would freeze as solidly as sculpture. In Antarctica now they would never let people hike eighty miles in mid-winter. If anyone moves, it is in a convoy of tracked vehicles. It is not that the present occupants are less tough than us. It is just that Antarctica is no longer a zone of crazy effort.

It seemed to me that the hut had once again become a place Where ordinary committees could meet and compound the ordinary zaniness of their members.

For example:

‘One thing I think we should do,' said Paul, ‘I think we should cease washing our faces at least for four days before we leave. I mean, it will let our natural oils accumulate.'

Alec Dryden, acting as chairman, nodded. ‘The others might find us hard to live with,' he assented, ‘but no one else has ever been exposed to mid-winter wind for the length of time we intend. We need every coating …'

‘Perhaps,' I fatuously suggested, ‘we could sit over Warren Mead's blubber stove in the stables. If we want coating …'

‘Excellent,' Alec cried. ‘Blubber fat would be better still. You see, Tony, you only
thought
you were being whimsical.'

‘My God!'

‘We will all three of us spend at least an hour a day sitting over Warren's blubber stove during the four days we don't wash. Now, if there are no more questions …'

Alec turned to the Admiralty map for the south side of the island. I watched Paul Gabriel's eyes gleam as he took in its details. It was a map people he knew had created – Scott and Stewart during their respective first expeditions. As for the Admiralty, it considered the permanent ice-shelf to be part of the waves that Britannia ruled in those days.

Alec pointed to the landmarks. First, Hut Point, a small peninsula miles down the sound. Scott had built a hut there in the summer of 1903–4, after working his ship farther along the sound than anyone else would manage to do until modern times. The hut he left was not much more favoured by us than was Holbrooke's. Something happened to Antarctic huts once they were left, once the fires burned out. They never became seriously habitable again.

At Pram Point we would turn the corner, drag the sleds on to the ice-shell and travel east to Cape Crozier. Fifteen miles from the corner, we would leave a small depôt. He thought we should make six miles a day on the way out, and eight on the way back. We would carry rations for four weeks though we would be back in three. Three hundred pounds of food. Ten gallons of paraffin weighing ten pounds per gallon.

In the mornings it would take us as long as two hours, wearing wolf-skin mitts and being careful of sudden numbness in the extremities, to take down the tent and pack the sleds. One of us would be frost-bitten every morning, and was to be attended to instantly, delay or not. The area behind Ross Island was hectically crevassed, and therefore we would take two medium sleds and place half the rations, oil, and other gear on each. In that case if one sled went down a crevasse, we would still have the essentials to crawl back home with. We would also carry certain self-recording instruments which Waldo wanted us to leave at Cape Crozier – amongst the penguins – for retrieval the next summer.

And Alec went on enumerating further burdens – medical kits, ropes, clothing, boots, barometers and wind gauges, a padded crate for the eggs – minor objects which yet added their discreet poundage to the load.

Altogether our burden would be seven hundred pounds on the two sleds. Some of that we would leave at the depôt placed fifteen miles east of Pram Point, and the weight would go on diminishing as we ate the supplies and after we had left Waldo's equipment at Cape Crozier. To drag the sleds we would wear man-harnesses of leather and canvas that fitted under the armpits and around the waist. Two weeks in them left your belly trim and rock-hard and they (like Antarctic burials) were always something I thought of patenting and marketing in this land of opulence and obesity.

At the end of the meeting, Paul and I moved away from Alec's end of the room together, Paul carrying the book he'd brought to the meeting with him. I was surprised to see that it was not some work on ornithology but Shakespeare's
Tragedies
. The committee which had endowed the expedition with books had seen to it that we did not go into Antarctica without the backing of the Bard and the Bible.

‘Improving yourself, Paul?' I idly asked.

He opened the volume where his marker was. The page was somewhere in Act
III
of
Hamlet
. I saw a few lines marked with pencil by Paul or an earlier reader. They are the lines in which Hamlet decides to face his mother and accuse her of her insensitivity in marrying Uncle Claudius so soon after her husband's death.

‘Soft! Now to my mother.

O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever

The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom!

Let me be cruel, not unnatural:

I will speak daggers to her, but use none …'

I did not read these words one by one, but saw them at a glance, knowing them from my performances as Hamlet in the sixth-form play at a Midlands grammar school.

‘Of course,' said Paul, ‘you don't realize when you're a schoolboy how strange a play it is. The ghost of Hamlet's father tells Hamlet that Claudius killed him and Hamlet must avenge the murder. But Hamlet's the only one throughout the play who actually hears the ghost speak, and so he could be quite deluded about what the ghost said, the ghost's message could have arisen purely out of Hamlet's deranged mind.'

‘I suppose so,' I said, not very interested.

‘And on the basis of that message all those deaths take place. Hamlet's mother, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, the King, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And I ask myself how such a mad young man as Hamlet can be a universal hero. And as an orphan – a more or less fatherless child – I think I have the answer. Hamlet expresses all the resentment men have against their fathers. And he doesn't do it shamefully. He does it with the sanction of a ghost.'

I laughed. ‘You make enjoying
Hamlet
sound like an act of father hatred.'

‘For all but fatherless sons,' he said.

Barry Fields, who was night watchman that night, woke me from the finest sleep of the week. I had been slumbering vacantly, with no undecided questions lying about my brain to fester into dreams. I didn't give a damn who Victor's new intimate might have been, I knew the Mulroys hadn't done the crime. I did not even dream of actresses and Lady Anthea Hurley. Until, from the vegetable innocence of my sleep, Barry, dressed in a greatcoat – for the stove was allowed to burn down a little at night – woke me by shining his storm lantern in my face.

The sleep had been so cleansing that I woke as I had slept, with a blank mind. I didn't know who I was, who Barry was, what the dark place might be in which he shone his lantern. Then I thought it was England, and that I was being roused early for farm work.

He said, ‘The bastard's been foxing us.'

‘What?'

‘He might be mad but he's been watching us watch him.'

My brain had begun to light up in the manner of a stage set; hut, Erebus, doglines, sound, mountains.

‘He saw us looking for him. He's mad, but that isn't always the same as being a fool. That midden, it was a sort of stage designer's garbage dump. He put it there to make us believe he lived way up the glacier. It was in a place we couldn't miss. I mean we thought we were bloody clever to find it, but really we couldn't have missed it, right there in a hollow. He kept it dusted clear of snow and he even put in a few pudding tins, which was a touch of some kind of genius. When I think of how pleased we were with ourselves. You can't help admiring the bastard. Because he doesn't live up there at all.'