A Victim of the Aurora (7 page)

We followed them and found Henneker, though not easily, since snow had fallen at his back and mounded him over. He lay facing the Pole. We had to walk round him and squat with our backsides to the south. His open eyes were very bulbous in the light of the lanterns. His tongue stuck out. It was black, a frightful excrescence, hopelessly ice-bitten. The panels of the face – cheeks, forehead, jaws – were bloated and already blackening.

Paul ripped the covering from his own mouth and vomited in the snow. I had felt nothing yet, my senses were still all in hiding and I saw the corpse and the problem distantly.

‘We have to carry him,' I called.

I saw Paul button up his mouth and shake his head. I felt anger. It spiked my throat.

‘Paul, damn it!' I screamed. ‘Take his legs!'

He obeyed me. It was obvious the body had already stiffened in the cold. Somehow, as we were blown north carrying Victor, we retained our lanterns. Possibly we were too numb to understand they were still in our hands. I was shocked and useless and dropped the shoulders twice. Paul seemed patient with me.

Some yards back we stumbled on Stigworth, the sweeper, and Nikolai, the dog handler. Under Stigworth's eyes were frozen tears.

‘The bastard won't move, sir,' he yelled at me. ‘He's hexed.'

Nikolai sat in the drift snow, shivering, his eyes closed.

‘It's all right. We've found Mr Henneker.'

I must admit that the class-consciousness of the day required me to call our weird load ‘Mr Henneker'.

‘Oh good, sir.' Stigworth screamed, ‘This bloody Roosian, he hates the dark, sir. He just sits there. You'd think, sir, in bloody Roosia, they'd be used to the dark.'

He kicked Nikolai, who opened his eyes, saw us and the corpse we carried, and began screaming.

That was the way we took Henneker back to the hut. Paul, Stigworth and I hauling him and a demented Russian wailing in our wake.

3

Sir Eugene Stewart had an alcove of his own. It was formed on three sides by a tall bookshelf, a plywood partition against which his bed stood, and the wall of the hut. The fourth side was made by a curtain hung from a rod. The curtain was rarely closed, but even when it was pulled back you could still only see in there from the corner where Dryden and Troy slept.

In this way Sir Eugene expressed both his accessibility and his desire for privacy.

On the night of Henneker's death the curtain was pulled firmly across, making a private room out of the alcove. Stewart had Alec Dryden in there, conferring with him. The rest of us were also finding it hard to digest Victor's death. We sat at the table, reading or writing, or else working numbly in our appropriate places. Paul, for example, had gone back to work on the skua, Hoosick wrote up the day's discovery in the biology-room, Peter Sullivan developed copies of last night's photograph in the darkroom. Quincy sat in a hard chair by his bunk, the bunk he had shared with Henneker. We presumed he was praying or mourning meditatively, in the manner of a clergyman, but he was the sort of man who would have thought it in bad taste to do it on his knees around people who were working.

I was still too bemused to be any use with a brush. When Waldo woke at eight I took him to the table and fed him tea and the last of Walter O'Reilly's bread for that day. I was in a state of mind that made me wonder if there would be bread tomorrow. It was clear to me that Victor Henneker had been treated violently and not survived the treatment. Therefore all the bonds and shared duties that made our life possible were under question, if not ruptured. It mightn't be long before everyone in the hut understood that, before things fell apart, the stove went out, the blankets iced, the drinking water froze over.

‘Waldo,' I said, ‘Something happened while you were asleep.'

‘A blizzard came up,' he said. He was embarrassed about that. That the weather should change radically while he was unconscious. ‘Poor John Troy. All that extra work.'

‘It wasn't just the blizzard. This afternoon Victor Henneker went out without telling anyone. We can't ask him why. But he fell and hit his head and, I'm afraid, he'd died of exposure before he could be found.'

Waldo looked at his hands, clenching the fingers as if he could read in the arrangement of the knuckles a clearer account of the death. He said at last, ‘You say,
of exposure
?'

‘Or of the head injury, or of both.' I had seen it all and his incredulity annoyed me. ‘Does it matter, Waldo?'

Waldo did not say. He still wore the contrite look that he always had following his fits.

‘He … he wasn't reading the weather screens?'

‘No. No, he did the two o'clock reading but came back safe from it. John Troy and PO Mulroy are doing the eight o'clock now. But it was late this afternoon Victor went out again, nothing to do with readings, nothing to do with anything. As I say, we can't ask him.'

After a while, Waldo said, ‘Death by a freak. Poor Victor. You'd think in a great …
enterprise
like this, you wouldn't die in that way. A bump on the head. Thanks for telling me, Tony.' He stood up, wavering a little. ‘I think I'd better go and see what's happened in my office today. While I was … while I was sick.'

He was usually a wry young man who made jokes quietly, out of the corner of his mouth. But guilt over his fits left him wooden.

At the end of the table the two geologists, Fields and Goodman, had been playing a dispirited game of chess. Usually they contested noisily, making speeches about their strategies, calling in other men to watch them make crucial moves. ‘See what I'm doing to this colonial Gentile,' Goodman would say in invitation. ‘Look at this, I've got his bishop and check,' Fields would announce. ‘Sheep farmer,' Goodman would say. ‘
Gefilte
merchant,' Fields would reply. They were the only two who mentioned Goodman's jewishness openly. They did it without any awkwardness. Tonight, though, there were no rantings or exclamations over the chessboard. Goodman beat Fields easily but seemed to get little joy from the triumph. Barry murmured his congratulations and drifted down the table to the place where Waldo had left me.

‘You're shocked,' he suggested gently. ‘I can tell.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Do you mind talking? About finding him and so on?'

‘Well …' Alec Dryden had asked me not to. To pretend shock and reluctance even if I didn't feel it. Of course I felt it.

Barry blinked, staring directly at my eyes. I wanted to laugh. He had the over-solemnity, over-frankness, of a child. ‘I mean, you found him. Did you really think he'd hit his head? Just that? Sorry if this is painful. But what did he look like?'

I couldn't frame words. ‘Yes. I don't know. Blisters. His face was blistered. I don't know.' I wanted my non-knowing-ness to sound like the last word.

‘You and Paul and the sweeper brought him back. Did Alec look closely at him? Listen, you've got to bloody forgive me. I've got reasons for asking.'

‘We put him on a bench in the naturalists' room …'

And instantly we had done it Paul went and leaned his brow against the wall. Stigworth sat moaning with a frostbitten hand and chafed it furiously against his chest far inside his polar clothing.

Nikolai was keening by the door. Only I – and I don't know why – watched Alec work with Victor. First he felt Victor's temples, then wrestled with the frozen gauntlets, seeking a wrist pulse. His attempt to close the eyelids failed since they were frozen to the eyeballs.

He touched Victor's bloated and frozen tongue and realized that, even if it were thawed, it would not fit properly back in the mouth again. Then, unbuttoning the iced wind-proofs from around the neck, he put his fingers towards Victor's carotid and saw, before he touched the cold flesh, what I also could see – the various purple bruises of strangulation on the throat. Alec stared at me a second, pulled the windproof collar back into place so that the marks were not so visible and asked me alone to help him carry Victor through our quarters, manoeuvring his stiffness around the end of the table, then into the sailors' quarters and so through into the workshop. I held Victor upright while Alec cleared a bench of hammers and chisels. When that was done, we placed the corpse on the bench.

‘There's no one else to ask,' he said, ‘so would you mind getting some blubber and lighting the stove here?'

The temperature in the workshop, you see, was probably close on freezing, but the room had an unused blubber stove which, if lit, would give out enough heat for the thawing of Victor's body.

I went out of the workshop to the space beside the men's latrines where frozen blubber was heaped. Men like Mulroy and Wallace flensed it away from the meat of any seal they caught, cut it in blocks and stacked it here where, of course, it froze. Every day sailors took a supply through to the stables for Mead to use in the stove there to keep the ponies warm.

I loaded myself with four blocks, enough – I thought – to warm Victor's corpse, and brought them into the workshop. Alec had already covered the body with a blanket. ‘It's from his own bunk,' he said. I could dimly hear the explosion of a flare in the blizzard outside. Stigworth or Paul must be doing that duty, pointing the flare pistol southward over the hut, so that the flare exploded in the blizzard above our heads.

I put the blocks of blubber in the perforated bin at the top of the stove. As they melted they would give off an unpleasant fatty smell inappropriate to respect for the dead, so I covered the bin with its steel lid. Next I opened the slide beneath the bin and lit the small oil burner inside the stove. I closed the slide. What would happen now was that the burner would melt a little of the blubber, the blubber oil would drip through the bin perforations and feed the flames which would melt more blubber still. And so a heavy sooty warmth would grow in the workshop.

‘Thank you,' said Alec. He took a chair and began filling his pipe.

‘Aren't you shocked?' I asked him. I thought the pipe was indecent.

He put it on the floor, near his feet, and put both hands on his knees. ‘You'll have to forgive me, Tony.'

‘It's all right,' I said. A sweet narcotic fug of blubber-heat was already growing in the room. ‘Go ahead,' I said, pointing to the pipe at his feet.

‘No,' he said. ‘No. What if you get us both a nip of brandy.'

‘Very well.'

‘But first, Anthony, could I ask you not to speculate? About Victor, I mean.'

‘Do I look like a gossip?'

‘Of course not.'

I went into our quarters and poured us a half-tumbler each from the brandy bottle. In the doorway near the darkroom and the porch beyond the naturalists' room, returning searchers were arriving and questioning and talking of the blizzard. Paul was sitting silent but thoughtful at the table, which Stigworth was serenely preparing for supper.

When I took the brandy back to the workshop, Alec raised his glass towards me. ‘To reticence,' he said solemnly.

At the dinner table later, Stewart had announced Victor's death and had even proposed aloud that it might have followed a heart seizure. Yet the obvious signs, he had said, were of head injury and exposure. God rest his soul, said Sir Eugene in conclusion.

With such guidance, I could now only be what Alec had suggested – reticent. I felt I risked bringing on a final chaos if I said, ‘The Owner – the Chief – Sir Eugene is lying into his soup.'

So as Barry pestered, I gave my colourless answers.

At last he kept silent, knowing he'd pressed me too much.

‘You said you had a reason to ask,' I suggested.

‘Yes.'

‘Well?'

‘It's that Henneker was a thorough man. In his field he was a damn sight more thorough than I am in mine. I can't – in fact, I don't believe – he'd let himself die that silly way.'

I thought that was a stupid reason, but didn't say so. I said what Alec had already said. ‘That sort of speculation is very dangerous.'

‘Lives have a unity,' he said. People then did believe death was man's last work and bore the mark of the man.

He patted my wrist. ‘You ought to have a hot drink and fall asleep early,' he said. ‘And I'm sorry. For nagging you, I mean.'

He went and found a novel and sat by the stove reading it. I sat alone and the longer I sat the better I came to like Barry's thesis. There is a Graham Greene short story about a man who is killed by a pig that falls from a balcony in Naples. Why? Because he is the kind of man of whom falling pigs take advantage. The story is actually about the son of the man, who is exactly the sort of person to be ridiculously orphaned. But Victor
wasn't
the sort of man on whom pigs fall. I knew that. Victor's death had the stature of an assassination.

I raised my head. Alec stood beside me. His pipe was unashamedly fuming between his lips. ‘Have you got a moment for the Leader, Tony?'

I stood up and followed him. We went into Sir Eugene's little alcove, and Alec rearranged the curtain so that we were unseen from outside. Sir Eugene sat side on to his table. He wore his stained white sweater and was frowning at some papers. When he saw me he put his head to one side as if I could immediately give him crucial information.

‘Sit on the bed,' he told me. I did so, arranging my legs either side of the scarred leather suitcase which protruded from under the bed-frame. Peter Sullivan at one time or another took a photograph of Sir Eugene working as he was now, frowning over papers against the background of books, bed and tattered luggage. Lady Stewart loved the photograph so much that that one – not the heroic, open-air shots of Sir Eugene be-furred, be-skied, visionary in the polar glare – was the one she hung in her living-room from 1913 till her death in 1952.

‘I'm not going,' Sir Eugene announced, ‘to make you take an oath or anything ridiculous. But we are concerned about rumours being started …'