Authors: John Christopher
They lay and talked quietly in the darkness; the awareness of Sheila lying injured had a sobering effect. She had refused to eat anything, despite urging. She seemed to have no bones broken, but was painfully sensitive in the region of the spleen. She said there was very little pain as long as she lay still; watching her face in unguarded moments, Jones had not been sure that he believed that.
The evening that was also night dragged on. Jones held Sheila’s hand, and talked to her in a low voice. Mostly he talked about the future: the flat in Rio, high above the city, looking out on the Sugarloaf and the sea, the warmth and gaiety, the golden beaches, the cafés … She listened and answered him from time to time. Once, when he paused, she said: ‘I love you, I love you,’ and their hands pressed together as though for the first time, as though everything was still ahead.
Gradually sleep claimed her, and Jones drifted into sleep in turn. He woke some time later and, in an unreasoning panic, thought she had stopped breathing: her body, against his own, seemed stiff and immobile. He sat up and, in the dark, put his face close to hers; the relief of feeling her breath against his cheek was exhilarating. Punching his coat into a more comfortable pillow, he lay down again.
A moment or two later, Thorsen whispered:
‘You awake, Henry?’
He whispered back: ‘Yes. What is it?’
Their heads were close together. ‘Henry,’ Thorsen said. ‘Henry what?’
He said: ‘I don’t understand.’ A chill of fear touched him. ‘You know my name.’
‘Jones,’ Thorsen said. ‘A good name, Jones. Like Nielsen, in Denmark. The kind of name that does not stand out, that draws no attention.’
Jones made no reply. Thorsen went on:
‘Don’t go to sleep, Mr Jones. I want to have a little talk. If we whisper quietly, no one will hear us.’
‘I’m tired,’ Jones said. ‘I’ll show you my passport in the morning.’
‘That’s right. Talk quietly. I’ve already seen your passport, Mr Jones. I look into these things. It tells me something. It tells me you are a clever man, a man who arranges things in advance, who makes plans. It is not too hard to get a new passport in a new name. Maybe you put a new wife on the new passport, too?’
‘You’re talking nonsense.’
There was silence; long enough for Jones to begin to hope that Thorsen had been bluffing, and that his bluff was called. Then the thin voice said:
‘I listened to you and Mrs Jones talking. I heard a little bit of it now and then.’
‘However much you eavesdropped,’ Jones said, ‘you didn’t hear anything that it would have mattered if the whole tent heard.’
‘Montevideo,’ Thorsen said. ‘I was there once. That’s a great place. I guess you will have a good time with Mrs Jones in Montevideo. You know what – I wouldn’t mind going along with you?’
Jones said nothing.
‘Don’t go to sleep,’ Thorsen said. ‘I think you will be happy in Montevideo. But I will not come with you. Three is a crowd – that’s an English saying, is it not? Anyway, I cannot leave my mother for too long. She is a fine old lady, but strict. If I went to Montevideo, she would come after me. It would spoil the fun.’
He paused. ‘I guess I have a lot of commitments in Denmark. Expenses, too. The things I like cost a lot of money. You can understand that, Mr Jones. The cheap stuff is no good when one has a taste for the best. You and I like the same kind of things, Mr Jones.’
‘I don’t think so.’
They lay face to face, conspiratorial, almost like lovers. Thorsen gave a thin chuckle.
‘But we do. You like money, and I like money. Have you looked at your typewriter since it fell off the sledge?’
‘No.’
‘That was lucky, it falling off like that. At first I thought it had gone down with the rest. I tell you, I felt bad about that. I was curious about that typewriter from the start, having a big new lock on it. And when you insisted to bring it with us, I knew it was a valuable machine. Maybe you are worried in case so valuable a machine got damaged when it was thrown off on the ice?’
Outside the tent the sound of the ice was farther off and muffled, but the wind howled loudly. Jones lay quietly, waiting for his tormentor to continue.
‘It got a bit damaged,’ Thorsen said. ‘I think it hit a hard piece of ice. The lock broke. You don’t have to worry, though. It still shuts. And tomorrow I will tie a piece of rope round to make sure it doesn’t fly open by accident. I know some good knots. I can tie one no one else will be able to undo.’
He drew in breath and sighed it out. ‘I will help you look after that typewriter, Mr Jones. When I saw the lock was broken, I looked inside. That’s a good model. I like that model. You and I will take good care of it the rest of the journey.’
Jones said: ‘If I choose to carry currency in a typewriter case, that’s my affair. It has nothing to do with you.’
‘And nothing to do with the Customs Officer, when you came aboard the
Kreya
? I guess the Customs people would be interested to ask you questions over it. Maybe the police would be interested, too. But you are right – that’s your business. I will help you look after it till we get to Scoresby. I think you will pay me something for helping.’
‘How much?’
Thorsen chuckled again. ‘We will think about that. It is hard to decide right now. If it is only the Customs, fifty-fifty might be fair. But if it is the police as well … We will talk about that another time, Mr Jones. In the morning. Now we go to sleep. You dream of Montevideo. I will find something to dream about also.’
Mouritzen woke when he was kicked in the stomach by a small foot. The figure that had nestled between him and Mary wriggled. He said:
‘What is it, Annabel?’
‘I had a pain in my leg. It’s better now.’
Mary said softly: ‘She had some cramp.’
Annabel snuggled back into her previous position.
‘Listen to the wind!’ she said.
It was wild and high-pitched; there was an impression of fury, hysteria almost.
Mary asked: ‘What time is it?’
Josef’s voice answered: ‘Soon after six o’clock.’
‘Then mine has stopped,’ Nadya said. ‘It says half past four.’
It was apparent that most, if not all, were awake; there was a general shifting and stirring. Olsen said:
‘Niels, before breakfast I think we will see if the tent is properly secured. If this wind gets underneath it, maybe we lose the tent altogether.’
Mouritzen said: ‘Right. I am dressing now.’
He had trouble with one of the insoles; it kept rucking up when he put his foot into the boot. Olsen was ready before he was. He flashed a torch and then bent to open the flap at his side.
‘Snow!’ His voice was muffled by the canvas. ‘And falling fast.’
Mouritzen at last made his own exit. He crawled into snow two or three inches deep. The snow was falling in big, whirling flakes, carried on a north-westerly wind. He walked round to the seaward side of the tent and came into its full blast. Putting his head down against it, he pushed forward towards the already snowy figure of Olsen.
‘Not good,’ he said. ‘We cannot travel in this.’
‘We need not fear for the tent, at least,’ Olsen said. He pointed with the torch and Mouritzen saw that snow had already drifted up against the side of the tent, anchoring it. ‘We will keep a roof over our heads.’
Mouritzen flashed his own torch around. The large, bright flakes drove through the beam, coming out of blackness and going into a blackness equally deep.
‘Save the battery,’ Olsen ordered him. ‘The spares were on the other sledge.’
He switched the torch off. ‘What do we do?’
‘What can we do? Wait till the blizzard stops.’
‘How long will that be?’
‘I brought no barometer,’ Olsen said, ‘and I had my corn plucked before the last voyage. For guessing, you are as well equipped as I.’
Inside the tent the news was received with considerable gloom. They did not, Olsen realized, share his own apprehensions: of a delay that could wipe out the already dubious margin between the time their food supplies would last and the time it must take them to reach Scoresby. They were depressed merely by the prospect of having to stay cramped up together in the tent. And that was enough in itself. It was virtually impossible for one person to move without disturbing three or four others. Generally the readjustment affected the whole tent.
They had a meagre and unsatisfying snack for breakfast, chiefly consisting of oats with milk and sugar and water from the melted snow. Sheila could not eat any; she had a little piece of chocolate and drank some water, but otherwise nothing. The others helped to make her as comfortable as possible, but there was not much that could be done. She lay there quietly, and Jones held her hand.
The actual physical gloom was as hard to bear as the cramp and confinement. Even though the blackness outside moderated as a meagre daylight filtered through the blizzard, it remained as pitch dark in the tent. The torches, clearly, could only be used in moments of actual need, such as during the preparation and distribution of food rations. For the rest there was continuous darkness, unbroken even by the glow of a cigarette. The smokers had stocked up with cigarettes and tobacco before leaving the
Kreya
, but Olsen ruled against any smoking inside the tent.
When noon passed with no slackening in the storm, hope of getting away that day was finally abandoned. Somewhat later paths were cut through the drifts that now packed on either end of the tent, to enable people to go outside for the requirements of elimination. After that there was nothing to do but lie in the dark, waiting for an inadequate supper, and for the long night which would be no different from the day.
‘In the night,’ Josef said, ‘it must snow itself out. Tomorrow we find all clear. For now, I have heard sleep is as good as food. We must try it.’
But in the morning, although the wind was less strong, it was still snowing. It snowed all that day, and all the next. They kept the paths from the tent clear, and by the evening of the third day the snow was packed higher than Olsen’s head on either side. The tent itself was covered with snow. It had a fairly steep pitch, but Olsen wondered how long it would be before it collapsed under the growing weight.
As to the members of the party, the second day saw a time of savage irritability, and a number of explosions into anger. Stefan and Thorsen quarrelled furiously when Thorsen claimed that Stefan, moving about restlessly, had kicked him. There was trouble of a less precise kind between Thorsen and Jones, and at one point, after he had been singing tunelessly in Polish for some time, both Stefan and Nadya rounded on their father. Olsen himself felt irritation grow in him like lust, with the same drive towards dissipation in some grand orgasmic outburst; but he fought it and controlled it. That the others should so signally fail to do the same was cause for the irritation to rise again out of its damped ashes; he took refuge at last in the cold haven of contempt.
By evening they had grown calmer; during that night and the succeeding day, tension turned into apathy. There was less talk. Blind and helpless, they withdrew into their separate cocoons of memory and desire.
Throughout, Sheila showed little change. She ate practically nothing, but did not complain. There was a period when Jones talked wildly of going out on his own to find help for her, but the obvious impossibility of travelling more than ten yards without getting lost hardly needed pointing out. Sheila quietened him. She asked him to talk to her because it soothed her. He talked of their life together; but always of the future, Olsen noticed, not the past.
It was snowing on the fourth day, too, but the impetus seemed to have declined; the flakes were much smaller and came in gusts. In the early afternoon, the snowfall stopped. Except for Jones and Sheila, they went outside to stretch their legs. They had to break a way up through the drift to the surface.
Olsen and Mouritzen talked together, away from the others. Mouritzen said: ‘My legs feel weak. I had almost forgotten what it is like to walk – or to breathe fresh air.’
Olsen gestured towards the grey sky lying over the white world.
‘It still does not look good,’ he said.
‘Do we break camp? Even if we only travel a kilometre, it would be something to do. We all need that.’
Olsen pointed at the frozen waters of the fjord. Snow lay thick on them, too, rounding and planing the angularities of the ice. Visibility was about a mile.
‘That is our direction,’ he said. ‘Five kilometres will not see us on dry land again if we set out. The risk is too great.’
‘So we stay here?’
‘We have almost no food,’ Olsen said. ‘If the blizzard returns, we may have none. If we can find it, I think it is time to kill the bear.’
Mouritzen shook his head. ‘The bear has gone. Did you expect it would stay, without food, for nearly four days? I saw Nadya searching for it. I think she was glad not to find it.’
Olsen gazed around at the unbroken surface of the snow, as though expecting to see the bear’s head sticking out. His gaze travelled on to the fjord.
‘Get the spears,’ he said. ‘We will go on a hunt. If we cannot have bear, maybe we will eat seal.’
He took all the men except Jones; Nadya, on her insistence, provided the replacement. They scrambled down through the snow to the fjord. The surface had been frozen completely by the blizzard; there was no sound or sight of running water anywhere.
After they had been ten minutes or so on the ice, Josef called:
‘Hi, Captain! Maybe the seals have gone south for the winter? Maybe they are sitting on the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea?’
‘Maybe,’ Olsen said. ‘Keep looking, all the same.’
Stefan said in a puzzled voice: ‘What is this thing?’
He was looking at an opening in the snow. Just below there was a hole ringed with ice. Olsen came over and began to brush the snow away with his gauntlet. He revealed a flat-topped, hollow dome. It rose about six inches from the surface of the ice and was some two feet in diameter.
‘They have not gone to Cannes after all,’ Olsen said. ‘This is a breathing hole. The seal keeps this open all winter, breaking the ice as he comes up for air.’