A Victim of the Aurora (24 page)

‘Cold night,' I called.

‘It certainly is,' said Paul Gabriel.

‘Have you been busy the past few days?'

‘Moderately. Dr Dryden and I have been dissecting a seal.'

Dr Dryden?
I let the latch loose on my door, crept to the occupied stall, dragged its door open. PO Henson was there, half-standing, his trousers round his knees. I told him to come out.

‘It's just my hobby,' he said, pulling his pants up. ‘Go easy on me, Mr Piers.'

‘Come with me, Ernie.' He was chewing his lips, imagining how little Sir Eugene would laugh about a puckish sailor whose best joke was using the gentlemen's latrines and conversing with them in their own voices.

I led him to the blubber stove in the stables and we sat on the boxes where Warren Mead and Alexandrei spent half their day.

‘The first thing, Ernie, Quincy doesn't call Hoosick Mr Hoosick. He always calls him Byram. Paul Gabriel likewise calls Dr Dryden, Alec. The titles are just a front they put on when they're with the sailors.'

‘I always started with first names,' he said, defending his art from a critic. ‘But after a while it would sound so wrong I'd always go back to surnames. If it was a wrong move, I seemed to get away with it. People do seem to talk a bit stiffer when they're in an outhouse.'

‘You can get in practice by calling me Tony.'

‘I did. The other night. Didn't I?'

‘So you did.'

‘I like to do him,' Henson admitted. ‘I like to do the Rev. Quincy.'

‘I believe you're very good at me too, Ernie.'

‘Yes, Mr … Tony.'

This conversation, the performance advice I was giving PO Henson, might seem improbable to anyone born after 1940. But in those days people spent their entire lives stuck like flies in amber in a particular level of society and had no way of discovering how people in another class
really
spoke to each other or behaved privately. There were no movies to intimate these things, and the theatre and music hall dealt mainly in caricatures. So, what I was telling Ernie Henson, my next-door neighbour, was all news to him. Apparently even a twice-daily visit to the officers' latrines hadn't been an adequate education.

‘I must say you were good,' I told him.

He tried to bite off his grin. ‘All the lads say that. They say I ought to go on the stage.'

‘You did Victor once. It was the day of Victor's accident.'

But he shook his head. He wouldn't do that to a man. He wouldn't mock a man the day of his accident.

‘I understand it must be hard to remember all your individual triumphs. But it was the time Reverend Quincy came and said that he was about to do an interesting experiment with the blood of an Antarctic cod.'

‘I remember that. Oh yes. I remember. He said, are you there, Henneker? And I thought what the hell. “Yes, dear boy, I said. Yes, dear boy.”'

I did not want Henson to dwell on the indecency of imitating the voices of the fated.

‘And you must remember,' I told him, ‘a special success you enjoyed four nights ago. When the Rev. Quincy came to the latrines and spoke to you.'

‘The lights went out and he said, “Oh lights out already.” And then I … well, I started doing
you
. He left after a while and the next one in was you. So I … I did the Reverend Quincy with you.'

‘A tour-de-force,' I said.

‘What?'

‘It's what the press will very likely say when you go professional, Ernie. It's a polite way of saying bloody brilliant.'

‘Thank you, Mr Piers.'

‘Sleep tight, Ernie.'

‘Are you going to say anything to Sir Eugene?'

‘You'll hear nothing, Ernie. Nothing. For all I care you can continue latrine-crashing.'

In the bunk area Victor had named the Cloisters, Paul Gabriel was already abed and reading a book entitled
Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
by a New Haven Yankee called John William de Forest. It was said to be a classic of the American Civil War and traced a Louisiana girl's rise to a Yankee rectitude of thought.

‘Enjoying it, Paul?' I asked.

‘Oh yes,' he said, without taking his eyes from the print. ‘If I'm not finished it the day after tomorrow, I must take it on the egg journey.'

He thought of the egg journey as a frontier. Once he was started on it he would be safe, Victor would be history and all culpability a historical question, like the question of blame for the death of Abraham Lincoln or Mary, Queen of Scots.

Weariness came down on me, indefinite but enervating. ‘I would like a long talk with you some time, Paul. But not tonight.'

‘Certainly,' he said absently. He turned a page and a new chapter heading could be seen. It said: ‘Colonel Carter Makes an Astronomical Expedition with a Dangerous Fellow Traveller.'

‘Don't forget,' Paul muttered, deep in Colonel Carter's dangerous expedition, ‘you have to sit over the blubber fire every day.'

‘As a matter of fact,' I said, ‘I've just been doing that.'

I considered him. The myopic assassin. I wondered how I could save him from suicide or execution. From his radical madness it was already too late to rescue him.

I presumed that Paul's crime had arisen from some homosexual crisis involving Victor, even suspecting that Paul was the new companion of whom AB Mulroy had told us, the lover who didn't need to have famous names explained to him.

Thinking that way, I went walking with Alec and Paul, a walk that was a toning exercise for our coming journey. If I abstracted from the question of Paul, I could almost have said I was strong, content and confident. That morning I had managed a successful water colour of the aurora. Men had crowded around my easel to admire it. They seemed to feel that now I had halfway expressed the inexpressible they would never be as awed and frightened again. It had been a week since I'd worked. I was glad to have the potency back.

Now, as we walked, I listened to Alec and Paul arguing about the ancient race of penguins. It was as soothing as when Barry talked geology. The towering mists of rock and penguin history imposed on me a calming sense of my context, my ultimate paltriness. For the moment my ultimate paltriness was a comfort to me.

‘They were never birds of flight,' Paul was saying. ‘I used to think they had been but the study of the latest work convinces me otherwise. Consider the case of those Argentinian geologists on the Palmer peninsula, who found the fossil of a sixty-million-year-old penguin tall as a man.'

‘Five and a half feet long in the taller instance,' Alec said, correcting the poetic inexactitude of
tall as a man
. ‘Only four feet ten inches in the other.'

‘And in these fossils no indications of a structure appropriate to winged flight!'

‘Yet the flippers were more elongated, proportionate to the structure, than in the current forms of penguin.'

‘No indication of keel bones!'

‘But what if they're in the embryos we find? Keel bones or wing quills in the embryo, which develop out by the time the chick is born?'

‘I suppose we
must
depend on this journey to put paid to all your speculations, Alec,' said Paul dismissively.

Alec smiled at me and we walked in silence, except for the strange squeak of our boots on the snowed-up surface of the sound.

‘Sometimes,' Alec said at last, ‘I pity the Emperors. In the spring, when the chicks are hatched, it's like a battlefield at Cape Crozier. Sudden cold spells will kill the young. Petrels will drop down from the sky and rip open the infants' stomachs to get to the fish inside. Parents who have lost a chick will try to pick up a stray one and, in the fight for possession, the chick is invariably trampled to death. It seemed to me that young cadavers were everywhere.'

Paul said nothing in reply to this. Alec possessed some ultimate authority – he had been to Cape Crozier one spring during Stewart's first expedition. He had seen the chicks perhaps six weeks after they ceased being embryos and cracked their way out of their eggs.

‘Yet when you consider,' he continued, ‘the price at which this is done.' He coughed. ‘There are probably six thousand adults in the Cape Crozier rookery. Six thousand males astride their eggs. They'll have been starving six weeks when we arrive. And even with their blubber for insulation they pay a savage price in terms of cold for the biological privilege of breeding. Consider what they might do if they all turned on us in rage.'

‘So,' said Paul, ‘they await their first clan chieftain, eh? Their first organizing King? That's poetry, Alec, but scarcely zoology.'

We stopped far out in the sound. The silence was that kind of Antarctic silence in which you can hear a dog bark eight miles away.

‘Shall we jog back?' Alec suggested.

I excused myself quickly. ‘I have some residual soreness.'

Alec cantered away and Paul was tensed to follow. I restrained him with a hand. He looked at me, half-smiling.

When Alec was more than a hundred yards ahead, I said, ‘Paul. I think you must have killed Victor.'

He looked straight at me, biting his bottom lip. Then he turned his eyes, the frosty lenses of his spectacles, to the ice-surface and began to nudge it with the blunt toe of his finnesköe.

‘That's right, Tony. As Hamlet must have killed Claudius, I suppose.'

I watched Alec diminishing in size ahead of us. ‘What?' I asked. ‘Hamlet? Claudius?'

‘I hope,' said Paul, ‘it won't interfere with the Cape Crozier journey. That means so much to me.'

I put a hand on his shoulder, just to support myself. I started weeping in front of him. ‘Oh Paul,' I said.

‘I had more sanction than Hamlet. I had better authority than a ghost. That man …' He began to lose control of his lips. ‘… that man told me himself. He had … he had an actual letter from her.'

There was only one
her
in Paul's canon. ‘Your mother? A letter from your mother, Paul?'

‘I don't blame him for coming, I suppose he'd already made his arrangements and he couldn't change them just because I was chosen. Just because my eyesight made me a late selection.'

He looked at me but I could not see the eyes for the rime on the lenses. ‘But I blame him for bringing the letter from her. He had something in his baggage to maim everyone with. And for me he had a letter that said, Dearest Victor, Our son …
our
son … is well and sucks from his mother and will never be importunate with his father.'

The whole great crime lay before me on McMurdo ice. It was all tentacles. It was more livid and purple, more glutinously, more heinously limbed than anything Hoosick and Quincy would ever bring up from beneath the ice. It was the grandest and worst cancer and might yet devour our crude society and stain the primal landscape.

‘It isn't her fault,' Paul assured me. ‘She thought I was a child of love. She told me whenever I asked. She would say, I can't tell you who he is, because you might visit him and see he's not interested. But I tell you this, you're a child of love. Love, she said, love is the only legitimacy.'

He shook his head at the memory, like a good son remembering little domestic eccentricities.

‘You know Mother,' he continued indulgently, ‘her opinions of marriage! Of family life …!'

At last I could speak. ‘The rumour always was … that you were the son of that confectioner. Who was he? Howard … Howard Middleton.'

‘Mother,' said Paul, ‘would never have given herself to such a vulgar man. To a man who gives gifts of real estate!'

Yet she'd given herself to the young Henneker, who could not have been a
gentil
and
parfait
knight.

We began to walk. Alec was now a black spot in the dazzle of moonlight on ice. ‘She lived by her concepts. She wanted no one else to be enslaved by them. Not even me. She would be hurt to know what Victor thought of her. But men like him – they never come to an honest view of women.'

‘You always trusted Sir Eugene,' I said. He had in fact edited the journal in a rudimentary way to save Sir Eugene pain. ‘Do you think you could speak to him?'

‘I'd rather wait till we got back from our journey.'

I sliced the air with my arm. His ease about the killing, his ease about my knowing, made me desperate. ‘Paul. If you don't tell him I'll have to.'

What was pitiable was that Paul didn't even think of threatening me. Patricide was his only strength as a criminal.

‘But the egg journey …' he said. ‘It's my project …'

When I began to groan he laughed uneasily, in disquiet at causing me grief.

‘All right,' he said. ‘Into the Leader's alcove!'

I couldn't speak now. I thought of his options, believing it likely that they would try to talk him into suicide, offering him a weapon butt first, asking him to be an honourable chap and end their anguish, their quandary. Otherwise there was always exile in the Forbes-Chalmers's manner, or an ultimate British hanging.

Unless he was forgiven. Simply forgiven by Sir Eugene. Like that. This unbalanced hope operated on everything I did in the next two days.

I remembered as we walked how he had found the tracks that evening, how his insistence had brought us to Victor. About this I questioned him.

‘I wanted to make sure, of course, that it had been done. Things done in a rage are like dreams. You can't believe them once you're awake.' He stopped a second, remembering apologies owing. ‘And might I say, while we're talking about passions, how much I regretted having to let that account of your friendship with Lady Hurley stand in Victor's evil little book. I considered taking it out. But I felt that if I spared you, I would have to spare everyone. Because I like them all. The only exception was one made for the Leader's sake. And we all depend on the Leader.'