Terra Incognita (46 page)

Standing in the kitchen in the main part of the hut, I realised how much the place had come to seem like home. We could have shut our eyes and reeled off the contents of the shelves, from the red Dutch cheeses that looked like cannonballs, their metal shells corroded, up to the set of tiny fluted metal pastry moulds.

‘You know, I've always wondered', Lucia said, pointing up to a shelf above the officers' bunks, ‘why they brought that trilby hat down here.'

‘Maybe it was for dressing up – I mean for plays or little cabaret sketches,' I offered. ‘They used to dress up a lot.'

‘Do English men often dress up in costume, then?' she asked, looking puzzled.

‘It's a class thing, I suppose – it was a kind of male upper-class ritual.' I immediately regretted saying this, as Lucia was fascinated by the class system and had often interrogated me on the subject. I had tried to paint her a comprehensible picture, and was irritably aware of my inability to do so. Sure enough, I had reminded her of unfinished business.

‘Now,' she said, ‘during the night I was thinking of what you said about “tea” meaning two different things according to which class you come from. You said that “tea” means the evening meal in working-class circles, and a mid-afternoon cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts off or one of those things you toast –'

‘A crumpet,' I interrupted.

‘That's it, a mid-afternoon cup of tea, dainty sandwiches and a crumpet in upper-class circles. When I come to see you in England' – visiting one another in our respective countries was now a popular topic – ‘if I meet someone on the sidewalk who invites me for tea, how will I know the time to go and what I'll be fed? Will I have to say, “Excuse me, are you upper-class or working-class?” in order to find out?'

‘Well no, you can tell by the accent . . .' I began, wishing I'd never introduced her to the concept.

‘Well, I can't, can I? What's your accent?'

‘Sort of middle,' I said miserably.

She threw me a vexed look and then, sensing that I couldn't be bothered to talk about it any more, she began getting out her pastels. I realised how much I was going to miss her.

It was too dark in the hut to paint properly, so once she had laid out her tools on Scott's desk, Lucia went outside and shovelled the snow away from the windows. The hut sprang to life like a mosaic sluiced with water. Scott's bunk was tucked in the left-hand corner at the end furthest from the door, shielded by a seven-foot-high wooden partition separating his quarters from those of the officers. The non-commissioned men slept at the other end of the hut, nearest the door. Half a wall of wooden boxes stencilled with brand names extended between the officers and the men; originally this wall stretched right across the hut, broken only by a narrow gap for traffic, but it had been demolished by the members of the Ross Sea party who camped in the hut. Presumably they were desperate to find anything still languishing in the boxes. Now, except for Ponting's darkroom, which was next to Scott's cubby-hole and directly opposite the entrance at the other end, the rest of the living area consisted of one large open space. It was about fifty feet by twenty-five, and narrow bunks were positioned around the edge while the middle was occupied by a long table and, at Scott's end, a black metal coal stove. The corner on the right at the far end, opposite Scott, functioned as a laboratory for the expedition scientists, and in it three or four benches and tables were piled with a plethora of vials and test tubes. The kitchen, still overflowing with supplies, was at the other end, on the right near the door, and here they had installed another stove.

Scott's den was about eight feet by six, and besides the bunk and a few bookshelves on the partition walls it contained only his desk. Two other bunks were also tucked away in there, a few feet from Scott's on the other side of the desk and underneath the medicine shelves. These were occupied by Bill Wilson, the chief scientist, and Lieutenant Teddy Evans, who went home with scurvy and returned in command of the
Terra Nova
. So Scott had never really been alone – at least outwardly.

At the foot of Scott's bunk the light revealed a hot-water bottle we had not seen before. We felt as if we were massaging the hut back to life. It never heated up though. It was colder inside than out, like a reverse greenhouse.

They had been very happy in the hut, as we had been in ours. Who wouldn't have been, in that place? This is what Cherry wrote about its position. He began by saying that he had seen a lot of volcanoes.

Lucia had decided to paint the freshly illuminated bunk, and positioned her stool so that it faced the hot-water bottled. When I shone my torch into the corner behind her, the beam lit up a small brown glass bottle on a shelf full of medicines. A neat, printed label announced simply ‘
Poison
', and near the base of the bottle another label read ‘
Harrods
'.

‘Isn't that a store for fancy people?' Lucia asked, following the beam of the torch. Oh God, I thought, here we go again. I nipped sharply into Ponting's darkroom.

‘Look at this!' I called. Lucia came in. ‘It's a glass negative – it shows a man having his hair cut here in the hut!' The image was fogged, but there, indubitably, was a gnarly old explorer sitting on a stool next to Scott's desk, a pipe protruding from his mouth at a jaunty angle and a pair of scissors held to his already cropped scalp by another man. Both were wearing baggy trousers. I had an idea.

‘I could cut your hair,' I said, ‘and we could set up an automatic-exposure photograph in here – I mean, to be exactly like them.'

This didn't go down at all well.

‘What are you going to cut it with?' she asked. ‘That Swiss Army knife you carry around? It's too blunt to cut the muffins.' It seemed only fair that she should let me do it after I had submitted like a lamb to the acupuncture needles. As I was thinking about how I might persuade her, she walked out of the darkroom and into the main part of the hut.

‘Do you think they missed Cape Evans when they were back at home?' she called. ‘The ones who made it home, I mean.'

‘They all said they did.'

‘Do you think we will?'

I looked at her standing there, a stick of chalk poised in mid-air, and I realised how rich our lives had been at Wooville. As Frank Hurley wrote, ‘We had learned to find fullness and contentment in a life which had stripped us of all the distinctions, baubles and trappings of civilisation.'

‘I'm sure I'll never stop missing it,' I said. ‘I'll think of it every day, sitting in my flat, looking out at the traffic. I know nothing will ever be like this again. I'll never feel quite so separated from my anxieties. It's as though God has given me a gift, once in my life, to step off the planet for two months and listen to a different music.'

‘Doesn't it make you unbearably sad – I mean, that it's over?'

I had to think about that.

‘In a strange way, it doesn't. I sort of feel I'm taking it with me – in my heart, if that doesn't sound naff.'

‘What does naff mean?'

‘Drippy . . .' That didn't help. ‘Mawkishly sentimental.'

She said no more, and I wandered aimlessly around as she painted, imagining them in this place or that, cosied up in their hut.

I wondered why in the world the bunks were so infernally small, and what had induced them to bring down a blue-and-white Chinese porcelain decorative bowl. I remembered, too, reading about a piano they had brought in from the ship (despite the fact that no one could play it) – but this had vanished.

After some time – it might have been ten minutes – Lucia said, ‘No, it doesn't.' I knew immediately she was answering my question about whether what I had said sounded naff. We often had conversations which included long pauses. We had learnt the rhythm of one another's thoughts.

She too, I knew, was preoccupied with the notion that it was all over. She called out –

‘What was that quotation you were telling me last night, you know, about being restored to a natural state – it was by one of those guys you call Beards?'

Many of our speech idioms had rubbed off – hers on me and mine on her – but I had failed to introduce ‘Beards' as a term one could use generically, without qualification.

‘It was by Reinhold Messner,' I said. ‘The greatest mountaineer alive. When he was down here, slogging across the plateau, he wrote, “It seemed to me as if I were restored to that time and that state when nature alone was God.”'

I went down to Scott's quarters to look over her shoulder at the pastel drawing.

‘Is it okay?' she asked.

‘The megaphone's good,' I said. They had presumably brought this object so they could converse from the ship to the sea ice. It had ended up hanging on a hook above Scott's desk. I had tried to think of a use for it at Wooville, but alas! I was too attached to my VHF.

‘There's something wrong with the way this light falls here,' I said, pointing to a corner of the painting. We had grown accustomed to being frank about the other's work – false politeness seemed absurdly out of place at Wooville. It would have been like wearing couturier parkas.

‘How about a touch of Naples yellow there?' I said, pointing again. She looked at the sketch, and then at me, wide-eyed.

‘I've taught you too much,' she said.

∗

Before I could go home, there was one thing I still had to do.

In the hut, a single shaft of light from the midnight sun cut above the mound of snow piled against the window and shone on to the long wooden table, casting distorted shadows against the far wall. It was the table loaded with bottles that Ponting photographed while roistering English voices rang around the hut. Lucia was sleeping peacefully in our own quiet hut, a hundred yards away. The wind reverberated in the small entrance hall like the sound of a train in a tunnel, though the body of the hut was almost silent.

I lay awake for many hours, my head on his pillow, as he, weighed down by his heavy responsibilities, must often have done. How very different the end had been for him. ‘Here, then, tonight,' he had written in his diary, ‘we have reached the end of our tether.'

The distended shadows shifted along the old wooden walls as the sun wheeled across the sky. I was thinking about my first day in Antarctica and the view from the top of the snowhill as the vulcanologist tap-tapped snow into his specimen tin. I could remember it as if it were yesterday. A great deal had happened since then. I had travelled thousands of miles, lost a lot of body heat, watched hundreds of beards ice up, realised how little I had seen, or knew. It was more of a
terra incognita
than ever. Byrd used the image of a beach and a tide to convey the changing of the seasons in Antarctica: the polar day was the beach, and the night was the tide. I had seen it come in, and I had seen it go out. It had all happened so fast. But I still felt the same about Antarctica. It was the great thrill of my life – on top of the snowhill, on Scott's bunk, in what was about to become my future. It had allowed me to believe in paradise, and that, surely, is a gift without price.

Then I laid my head on his pillow, and went to sleep.

EPILOGUE

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink

Life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea, I am becoming a name

For always roaming with a hungry heart;

Much have I seen and known, – cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleanis that untravelled world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought . . .

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me –

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed