When Nights Were Cold (3 page)

‘Precisely, Jane,' said Father. ‘You're quite right. I should have listened to you from the beginning. Yes, Catherine will be a bird in a cage. A songbird lives happily in a cage since it has never known the wilderness. This house is safe and my daughters have everything they need. Let's put an end to this now before more harm is done. I'm sorry I ever allowed the audition to take place. It was unfair of me and for that, Catherine, I ask your forgiveness.'

Catherine should have told him that forgiveness was not forthcoming but strangely, I thought, she did not.

When Frank left, a great portcullis seemed to clank down over the front door. I put a cushion over my face to escape and sat for a few minutes in the dark. Nothing happened. When I lifted the cushion, Catherine was still at the piano, her red hairs reflecting the light as though to send a signal out somewhere. Her chest and shoulders heaved, but she didn't cry. She rose from the stool and clattered upstairs to her room. My parents rushed after her.

I was alone. I went to the piano and, very quietly, opened the music and picked it up where it had stopped. With clumsy fingers and uneven rhythm, I played to the end. It was bad but the music was complete.

‘The evening is over, Grace.' From the doorway my mother spoke softly. ‘Go to bed and don't talk to your sister on the way. She'll soon be fine.'

‘She wants to go to college. She'll be bored if she stays here.'

‘A bored person is a boring person, Grace. She'll find plenty to do. You should be pleased that she'll still be at home with you. It's nice for sisters to have each other close.'

My mother, with her light voice and the wide, blinking eyes of a doll. She was always able to make things right. She could patch up a torn dress in moments. Sometimes she waved a pretend magic wand over an injured bird or swollen ankle, and it would get better, but tonight she was wrong. As I passed her, she rested her hand on my arm but I wriggled away.

‘It's for the best,' she said. ‘You'll see.'

Father was talking to Catherine in her room. I crouched at the door to listen. I hoped that she would threaten to leave the house and never come back. I hoped that she would threaten to poison herself and that my father would repent, but her voice was a calm, steady murmur.

‘My leg is not good tonight.' Father's voice came close to the door. I moved away. ‘I must take my medicine before bed.'

‘Poor Father,' said Catherine. ‘It must be very painful. What can I do to help?'

I understood then that Catherine would not fight. She didn't have the strength. Father loved her too much. And if Catherine had to stay here then I would also have to stay.

Catherine was supposed to become a concert pianist and I had planned to follow my father's example and become an explorer, though not, of course, in the Navy. I'm not sure why I had imagined that this would be palatable to my family since, in 1893, my father had been one of those who voted against women becoming fellows of the Royal Geographical Society. He had mentioned it many times and with pride but, because he was my father and seemed to love me, I took nothing personal from it. I was his favourite companion for trips to London Zoo and Kew Gardens. He liked to share his knowledge of plants, animals, insects and climate with me, but he never talked to Catherine or Mother about these things. When he referred to girls and ladies, I thought that he meant ones like Catherine and Mother and the ladies we knew in Dulwich, who liked to stay out of the sun and travel no further than each other's at-homes. I didn't think then that he included me.

Father had been a real traveller when he was a captain in the Navy but now he was an invalid. He went to China when we were small and his ship was caught in a storm on the Yellow Sea. He told this story many times, never quite the same way twice, but I kept some version of it that I understood as truth. A sudden roll of the ship tipped four men overboard and my father was one of them. Afterwards, all he recalled was that he had been thinking of my sister and me, how strange it was that we were there in the morning cutting the tops off our boiled eggs, while he was already at night, fighting sky and sea. The three who went down with him drowned, but Father emerged near some piece of debris from the ship, hauled himself atop it and wrapped his arms around wooden struts that felt like table legs.

At daybreak he was floating on a flat, emerald sea. His head was resting on his arms, which were blue from the cold, but he felt hot and tried to pull off his shirt. A small boat sailed towards him, and human voices screeched like herring gulls. A rope went round Father's middle, tightened and pulled. In his hallucination he thought his rescuers were the three drowned sailors, come to collect him for the journey to the next world, but they were four cheerful fishermen from near Weihaiwei who wrapped him in nets for warmth and took him to the edge of the naval base. He fell unconscious and woke up later to find that he had gangrene from hypothermia and the surgeon had cut off part of his left foot and three fingers. He began to cough and, though he did not know it then, the damage to his lungs meant that the cough would stay with him for the rest of his life. Father was invalided out of the Navy and he came home, a smaller, weaker man who never liked to see his seafaring friends any more.

He told me that he regretted clinging to the wreckage in the sea and that he only did so in the hope of rescuing his men.

‘I let them perish, little Grace,' he said. ‘And God made me survive in this hopeless state for my sins. He is just, you see, but He is cruel.' He held up the remains of his hands. ‘Anyone can look at me and know that I failed.'

I didn't like Father to say such things. He believed that God would not forgive him and he hated going to church on Sundays. He still attended, once a month or so, for the family reputation, but he said that God could not welcome him and it was hard. Sometimes I imagined myself diving into the water to rescue the sailors, swooping deep, somehow holding the collars of three of them in one hand, then using my other arm to swim quickly away and deliver them to my father so that the world could call him a hero.

Father walked a little, but his left foot was no more than a stump and he had pains that shot up his legs and made him gasp. He sat in his study, reading journals and puffing on a clay pipe. Sometimes he rode up and down the streets in a hansom and stared out of the window, trying to find something to cheer him up, but he rarely came upon anything he liked because he did not like anything much any more except for being at home. When his lungs weren't bad and he could pass an evening without coughing too much, he would attend lectures at the Royal Geographical Society in Burlington Gardens. Sometimes our family physician, Dr Sowerby, would come to see him and stay for dinner or drinks and they would smoke their pipes and complain about the stupidity of politicians, suffragists and omnibus drivers.

On other nights he would read geographical journals by the fireside late into the night, turning the pages with stiff flicks of his fourth finger and sometimes, when he forgot himself, the tip of his nose. He liked to read about the journeys to the coldest ends of the world – the Alps, the Poles, Himalayan summits – places, he said, where Heaven and Earth touched and anything was possible.

Catherine and Father were quiet now. I crept back to my room and opened the curtain. The street was empty. I could see over the rooftops of Dulwich and Sydenham. Just a mile or two away was Ernest Shackleton's childhood home. He had been to the Antarctic with Captain Scott but came home early because he'd fallen ill, a bit like Father. I strained my eyes to see if I could make out the roof of a house that might be his, but all the houses in all the streets looked the same.

I put my finger into the condensation on the window and wrote my name. Surely, I thought, if my father could travel through the tropics and into the Arctic Circle, if my neighbour could reach the Antarctic and walk on ice, if Frank Black was going to Oxford, Catherine and I could at least get out of Dulwich.

Chapter Three

We opened the tent flaps and screwed up our eyes to survey the scene. The cracks were vertical, black gashes in the snow. From a distance they resembled people and I stared for some time to be sure that they didn't move. I pulled my hood around my face and squinted harder. The sun hummed in a blue sky but the good weather would not last.

We had slept well the previous night, but the snowfall had shifted the landscape. When we began to move, frostbite gnawed our feet, yet we still had miles to travel. My skis slipped forward, one and then the other, and I was off. I was slicing through the soft whiteness, bridging crevasses, dodging plugs of snow and passing safely across the land. I was headed south.

‘Grace, put out your light. I'm not made of money.'

I rolled over in bed. Father was such a gloomy cheeseparer. He wouldn't even let me have a new dress and all my old ones were too short now. We lived in a big house with servants but there was never money to spend.

Where was I?

My sleeping bag.

My tent.

Blubber burning on the primus stove.

Ponies and dogs.

A motor car.

A motor car?

It began to melt. I was almost asleep.

‘Your light, Grace.'

‘Mm. Yes, in a minute.'

When was this? Later. 1908. Ernest Shackleton had left New Zealand for his next attempt to reach the Pole. Father and I read about it in the newspapers. This time he was the leader of the expedition, which I was pleased about but, still, I worried for him. I had seen a diagram showing the layout of the
Nimrod
and I could not see how it could be large enough for all that it was said to carry. There were ponies, men, dogs added in at the last minute in New Zealand, vast stocks of food, animal fodder, scientific equipment, all sorts of daily supplies, and a motor car (possibly
two
motor cars). It seemed to me that the ship would need to be several times larger than it was. I often lay awake fretting that it would sink, that the men and ponies would freeze to death in the sea.

I pictured Ernest on the flooded, rolling deck, his face filmy and his hair wild in icy clumps. The ponies and dogs began to fight, biting necks and ears, tossing and yowling. The men cried out and the car rolled off the deck and fell through a hole in a slab of ice.

But the ship must be strong because Shackleton intended to reach the Pole this time. My father, who had been speaking to his friends at the Royal Geographical Society, said that the route to the Pole belonged to Scott and that Shackleton would have to keep off Scott's turf. I said that I didn't think they would find much turf at the South Pole. He roared:
He's not a naval man. He'll never succeed, the wretched scoundrel, asking all and sundry to fund him on this hasty escapade.

I could hear him now, in the drawing room with our neighbour Mr Kenny, shouting about the scandalous behaviour of a shopman from our street who had done something terrible, but I could not catch what it was.

‘Disgraceful behaviour.' Mr Kenny relished the words. ‘I hope there's a brother who can chase him and shoot him.'

‘I've a good mind to write to
The Times
on this very point.'

He was always writing letters to the newspapers and sometimes they were published and he read them aloud to us at breakfast.

I shut my bedroom door and pulled my pillow around my ears. I wanted Shackleton to succeed but how would he afford it? Could one just write to people and ask them for hundreds of pounds? Wouldn't they think it rude? It seemed a terrible thing to have to do for such an important expedition. Yet people were giving him funds and expecting him to pay them back when he returned. How would they know that he had the money? What if, like Father, he was injured and wouldn't be able to work? Father was wealthy because he had money from his father. He never had to write and ask a stranger for help.

I was coming to the end of my school years. I was trying to accept the prospect of a life at home like Catherine's, then perhaps marriage. It depressed me, for I knew it was all wrong and not the life I felt sure I was supposed to have, but my parents would never change their minds about university and work. How could I learn anything from the explorers when they never had to contend with such nonsense?

It was three years since Catherine should have gone to college. She no longer took piano lessons. She played in the evenings, still, as Father demanded it, but with a different kind of fervour. Her music was less precise. She was careless in difficult technical passages. She rarely bothered to learn new music, not with the hours of work and pencil scratching of before, but made lazy, haphazard attempts at pieces she had already studied. During the daytime she helped Mother run the house and she spent hours on her needlework, making rag dolls in bright dresses for the church bazaars. She never complained but she hardly spoke to me nowadays. I had annoyed her by continuing to mention the Royal College and all the things she might still do, if only she would try. She told me she never wished to speak of it again and that I had better worry about my own life for a change for I was hardly doing anything so extraordinary.

I still worried about her.

For the first two years after leaving school, Catherine had received invitations to dances and parties. She always declined. Neighbours invited her to give recitals, but she said that she no longer had the nerve to play to an audience. She had one or two friends from her schooldays and, though they paid occasional visits, Catherine rarely left the house except to run errands. The friends and invitations stopped coming and Catherine seemed relieved. When he was well enough, Father took her to recitals at Bechstein Hall, but he was embarrassed by his cough and sometimes spent most of the concert waiting in the lobby while Catherine listened to the music alone.

‘I don't know about life outside the house,' she said to Mother. ‘It doesn't seem to suit me any more. It's much nicer to be at home and not have to worry about things. Whenever I go into town, I come back with a frightful headache.'