A Victim of the Aurora (23 page)

Later that evening Barry took the risk and groped out to the ice embankment. It was as far as we could hope to go in our search for Forbes-Chalmers. The hermit's bunk was still made up quite neatly with its blankets and furs, Barry said on his return. When he had crawled back into his sleeping bag, I think he was weeping, whether for the cold or the hermit I do not know.

We slept badly. If one of us dozed the others would begin a conversation about survival. Did Forbes-Chalmers have a second hole? A den for emergencies?

‘If not, can a man survive by digging himself into the snow and sleeping the blizzard out?'

‘The dogs do it that way.'

‘We know the dogs do it that way.'

We would refer to the lore of earlier expeditions. ‘I knew a man,' said Barry. ‘Hoar was his name. Or Hare. Or O'Hare.' His uncertainly about the name didn't say much for the exactness of the story. ‘A fellow countryman of mine.'

‘A socialist?' I asked ironically, but the irony was ignored.

‘He was lost for a day and a half during a blizzard down on Hut Point during Scott's expedition some years ago. He did that, dug himself in. Now he's back in Queensland growing pineapples. But that was midsummer. This is midwinter.'

Quincy spoke of the shepherds of Yorkshire who wrapped themselves in a blanket, then in canvas, and slept well in the rain.

By way of epitaph, Barry said, ‘He may have stank, but the room was tidy.' And then, ‘They say at first it's fierce, freezing and then it becomes a pleasure. I believe drowning's something like that.'

Soon after, I fell asleep and the pummelling of the blizzard on the tent surface became a narcotic throb in my brain. I did not wake for seven hours. When I sat up and had checked the time, I noticed that both Quincy's sleeping bag and Barry's were empty. In such circumstances, when there is infinite blackness beyond the double walls of canvas and only the fragile nimbus of lantern-light for company, the feeling of being the last man on earth becomes a morbid conviction.

At once I needed to know if the others were close by. Yet first I had to beat my frozen finnesköe until they were malleable enough for going on my feet. Once I had them on, I loosened the lanyard at the mouth of the tent. As I crouched, half-in, half-out, it seemed to me that visibility had improved to a full handspan.

However metaphysically isolated I felt, I staggered to my left a little, overcome by the necessity to urinate. After a step or two I could not see the cone of the tent, but very nearly collided with a shape. I could make out the stance of the shape, or rather by the outline of its shoulder, that it too was relieving its bladder.

‘Barry?' I roared. ‘Brian!'

The prosaic names, from the world of trains and town-clerks and daily newspapers, were erased by the wind. But further individualities of the shape before me convinced me that it was Quincy.

‘Tony?' he called, but stepped one foot farther north. It was an unconscious gesture of clerical modesty that made him turn his back to me like that, for I could barely see him in the first place. Now I could not sight him at all. I hoped his old-fashioned personal reticence did not carry him too far north and lose him in the storm.

I shrugged and began attending to myself. Once I had dinner with Admiral Byrd, the Antarctic hero of the 30s. He told me when the dessert wine had been served that he considered the greatest problem of Antarctic exploration was how to extract half an inch of frozen organ from three inches of protective clothing. I dealt with the problem and idly considered the ridiculousness of natural functions in the open in this place and then again the shyness of the Rev. Quincy. And it was while my mind idled in this way that I deduced, without fully knowing I had done it, who had broken Victor's skull and throttled him, how it had been achieved to the confusion of all parties, and when and where.

When I found what I had done, I had no joy but stood dazed and unbuttoned. Only when I began to feel in my genitals the sting that precedes frost-bite did I remember where I was.

Quincy found me in the dark and passed me and crawled into the tent. When I followed I found him already breaking out the biscuit for breakfast. I should have taken over, since he had cooked last night. But I was too dispirited to offer.

‘Barry's over in the ice hole,' Quincy told me. ‘He went over there at five this morning. He got the feeling that the man would come back. Of course, it hasn't happened.'

‘It isn't going to happen,' I said a little brutally. ‘The man couldn't leave us alone. Yet he can't live with us.'

‘You think he's given himself up to the blizzard?' Quincy asked. The niceness of the image annoyed me.

‘If you want to put it that way.'

Quincy stared at me but uttered none of those parsonical exclamations that you'd expect of clergymen when the question of suicide arises. I was grateful for that.

‘Brian?' I asked. ‘That day, the day Victor just walked out in the blizzard. You said you went looking for him about mid-afternoon. And found him in the latrines.'

‘Yes.'

‘You didn't open the door and actually see him?'

‘No. A man's entitled to his privacy.'

I thought of Petty Officer Henson. A full-blown Edwardian crime, something as opulent and amply limbed as an Edwardian
demi-mondaine
, would incorporate elements such as PO Henson. The number of times I had found him amongst the sailors impersonating Sir Eugene or Alec or Troy. His part in the organism of the crime was no established datum. Yet a scientist can define the nature of a certain acid in the nucleus of a life cell, say, by his constant failure to discover it by test. Similarly I could define Henson's part by its apparent absence. It would not be the first intuitive leap I had made in my confused study of the crime, but it was the first correct one.

‘One of the petty officers – Henson. He's a mimic and a practical joker. He could have been in the officers' latrines that day. I mean, it's exactly the sort of joke he loves to play. And if he's sitting there enjoying his little escapade and someone comes and calls
Victor
, he might decide to take the joke further and answer in Victor's name. Especially if Warren Mead isn't in the stables and he can scamper back to the sailors' quarters as soon as you turn away.'

‘No. It
was
Victor. It was exactly Victor. The use of the phrase “dear boy”. “I'll be right along, dear boy. Hang on to your curious fish for me.” That sort of thing. No one can imitate it.'

‘You just did. Though Henson is better.'

‘It
was
Victor!' Quincy insisted. My grin must have been the annoying grin of impenetrable certainty. Henson had answered Quincy. For Victor had already left the hut, and at a reasonable time, before the blizzard was more than a rising wind. ‘Henson, of course, has no sense of guilt about playing this little joke on you. He has no idea how much rational weight Alec and Sir Eugene place on your conference with Victor in the latrines. Sir Eugene doesn't tell the sailors these things. They're innocents to him, and knowledge will spoil them.'

I then asked the question which would rout the Rev. Quincy. ‘Brian, a few nights ago. Did I speak with you in the latrines?'

‘Yes,' he said.

But I laughed, he was so mistaken.

‘Brian, this is serious. Please answer me truthfully.'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you mention trolling to me?'

‘The other night you spoke to me in the latrines, and I told you I might be trolling the next day.'

Quincy had just put an axe to the roots of my theorem. I should have been pleased, since the original deduction had stunned me to the point when I began to suffer frostbite of the body. Yet I still believed in the tree of my reasoning; Quincy's refusal to make his contribution to it had only convinced me of its intricacy, its speciality.

By the time he had the breakfast stew bubbling I had explained to myself exactly how he had been misled. Fuelled by the small perverse elation of this further step of reason, I crawled out into the storm to fetch Barry for breakfast.

Once outside I remained on my hands and knees. Crawling, it was harder to move in a semicircle, easier to keep straight and find the ice embankment. Easier then to find the hole and Barry.

I knew that it was no use talking further to Quincy. I must get back home to Cape Frye and talk to Henson. I could think of Cape Frye as home now. The killer was known and was now merely a pitiable item of the household.

Inside the hole, Barry had discovered Forbes-Chalmers's library. None of the books had inscriptions in them except for a rubber stamp-mark saying that they were provided by the
Library Fund Committee of the British South Polar Plateau Expedition
. They had entertained the world's ultimate castaway for nearly four years. There was a Bible, Rider Haggard's
She
, Kipling's
Jungle Stories, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Deerstalker
of Fenimore Cooper,
Murders at Brostwick Abbey
by Bernard Higgins,
The St Meryn Cricket Club Murders
by E. C. Halsey,
Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898–1899
by Frederick A. Cook, and
The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of Erebus and Terror in the years 1839–1843
, Volumes 1 and 2, by Joseph Dalton Hooker. There was no book of geological survey notes and no geological reference book. There were no navigational or geological instruments or tools.

Perhaps Forbes-Chalmers had dumped them all somewhere when his new life began. To be a hermit is probably an all-consuming occupation.

The blizzard lasted a full two days. Barry spent most of the time in Forbes-Chalmers's ice-house, accustoming himself to the disappearance of the man. There was, as a result, more room in the tent for Quincy and me. We read and talked and were more or less comfortable.

When the wind dropped it did it slowly. But by five o'clock on our third afternoon you could see the ice embankment dimly from the tent door. Immediately the three of us did our duty and went out looking for Forbes-Chalmers. We travelled five yards apart from each other and moved inland. Our guide was a small hand-compass specially adjusted to take account of our closeness to the South Magnetic Pole. We encountered, after a mile, some broken ice-ridges which not even Forbes-Chalmers would have tried to travel in a blizzard. We searched northwards two miles along the foreshores, calling all the time. We searched south as far as the defile where Forbes-Chalmers had made fools of us. The cold was, of course, unspeakable, especially in that three-mile beat southwards, facing the wind.

So we were staggering when we found Forbes-Chalmers's cape again. We lay on sleeping bags waiting for our hoosh to cook and there was little conversation. Each man lost himself in an obsession over the savour of the cooking food. After the meal, Barry got ready to spend another night of eccentric vigil in the ice hole. Before he left he turned to us.

‘I was so bloody hungry tonight,' he confessed. ‘I think I can understand cannibalism.'

‘Oh yes, oh yes,' said Quincy.

‘But of course he's right. That Forbes-Chalmers. You couldn't go on living the same way afterwards.'

The next day we hiked fifteen miles, calling for the man in a variety of directions. The lack of an answer did not surprise me.

As Cape Frye came into sight that afternoon we could see also the shapes of men and ponies exercising each other on the ice of the sound. Closer to them, we could identify Mead in front, walking the convalescent mare, Tulip. Then Stewart with Larry, Alec with Shylock, Troy with Sally and so on. I noticed that Norman Coote led Igor, the brute who usually led me. It was good to see them, to come out of a great vacancy and find them at their daily routine.

One of them spotted us in the distance and waved, and passed the word along the line. The horse-walking stopped. Everyone stood still to count us and wonder why there weren't four. Stewart hurried Larry back towards the shore to intercept us before we reached the hut.

Once he found out that Forbes-Chalmers had vanished he turned to other questions. That was his nature, to pretend to be more interested in the periphery than the centre. As if his mother had told him it was bad manners
ever
to utter his disappointments.

He asked how fast the sled journey over the ice had been? How long we had spent searching yesterday and the distance covered? How tired we'd been? How far we'd walked and sledded today? How tired were we at the moment? Did we think the balance of fats and carbohydrates was correct? Did we think, if the blizzard had lasted a week, the sledding rations in the three-man pack would have been adequate for us to stay healthy and sled home? He kept at us and we answered him dully.

We had been gone a mere three and a half days but the refinements of the hut dazzled us as the Savoy might dazzle a farm-labourer. We sat for a long time with hot mugs of cocoa in our hands. The flesh of our palms gratefully took in the heat, while AB Stigworth, as a concession to our small winter journey, laid the table around us. If I hadn't been surrounded by colleagues I would have groaned like someone sexually aroused as the heat of indoors took over my extremities and crept towards my core.

Despite the warm air and the warm food that followed, I spent two hours in the latrines that night. I went heavily clothed for comfort and carried a novel called
The Courage of Captain Plum
by James Oliver Curwood, and a pocketful of candle stubs. I kept a conversation going with every visitor. They were short and undemanding conversations since no one stayed in the cold latrines longer than they needed.

In this way I spoke with Mead and Goodman, with a drowsy Barry Fields, with Peter Sullivan, Hoosick, Norman Coote, Harry Kittery, and even with Sir Eugene. Close to eleven, when Captain Plum had ceased to entertain and I was beginning to doze, I knew by the opening and shutting of a door two stalls away that I had a late visitor.