‘That’s where you will stay,’ she said.
Why she was telling him this, she could not imagine. She had had to work it out for herself. ‘Frances is in the garden, I think. In Glasgow,’ she said.
Hooker shook his head. ‘Frances and her garden,’ he muttered fondly. ‘Well.’
He glanced behind him in the direction of the Ross Sea and those days on the Terror.
‘Truly,’ he said, ‘I think it was in London. At the Royal Geographical Society. Or maybe Kew.’
She could not help but smile. No sooner had he said it than the sky darkened readying itself to pull him back, halfway across the world. Taking him away. Hooker and his heartbreaking significance. Hooker, who, when it came to it, had meant nothing at all.
As he receded, the ice reappeared and she felt a release as if she had been freed from a prison, the door simply left open for her to walk away. She lingered at the edge of the glacier, where the mountains rose. She glanced at the receding dot of Joseph’s figure for only a moment and hovered as if in memoriam to her lost love. All that emotion, wasted. Then she turned her attention back to the ice plane and searched for the men.
TWENTY-FOUR
[location] 88˚ 23': 97 miles from the pole
The remnants of Shackleton’s flag remained, a tattered frozen symbol. It was there, where he had turned back that Karina found herself staring into darkness. She could go no further. Scott had reached the limits of her territory. The boundaries of her world. The men had toasted. Camped. Taken a photograph. And then one by one she watched as Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and tall Taffy Evans passed into the void, and she was left, there underneath the frozen, tatty flag. She could not leave. Not now. Not without knowing. Was she ever so devoted in life, she wondered. She could not now remember.
The plateau seemed too silent without the tiny party and the crush of thoughts and emotions, their private conversations and dreams. As Scott disappeared, she felt his rush of happiness evaporate on the freezing air and she realized how much she had felt through the skipper and his men. With Joseph gone, she wondered why the English still held her attention. It was as if, having been introduced to someone at a gathering, they suddenly ceased to be a friend of a friend and became a friend themselves. The most important thing about Scott was no longer that he once met Joseph Hooker. The most important thing about Wilson was no longer that without him Scott would never have made it this far. She remembered Birdie Bowers singing at Cape Crozier and felt proud. The pole was important to these men so it had become important to her and she hoped that they would make it. Why ever not?
As she looked back along the line of food depots they had left, she felt strangely isolated. She had been trapped here for almost a century. She gazed fondly northwards, knowing that among the black dots heading back to Hut Point, Cherry was on his way. But she did not follow. Instead she settled down to wait. It was oddly uncomfortable and to pass the time, she played with the newly fallen snow, whipping it up as if she was shaking a snow globe at a fair. She stared upwards at the sky, ten years old again and once more lying on her back in Ven, examining the clouds. Whether this took an eternity or only a minute, she could not say without checking the men heading back to base, as if they were her pocket watch. Tentatively, she reached out a finger to try to push through the void, but the blackness engulfed her and when she woke, by Cherry’s progress, well beyond Wilson’s carefully calculated supplies at One Ton Depot, she estimated that she had disappeared for two days. He was almost at a place of safety. As the wind whipped up and the snow flurried, the flakes beyond her disappeared. Nothing blew in this direction from the darkness. Nothing came back.
Here on the cusp between unremitting light and absolute darkness she was put in mind of Marijke in her more innocent days, hovering beside the window to see the boy she hoped might pass. Now, Karina waited on Scott’s party to return. She was keen on them. She flew high, hoping to spy the first sign of a return. She turned away, fancying that if she refused to look, perhaps it would make them arrive more quickly. Time folded over and she fidgeted uneasily. She worried that something deadly behind the dark curtain might take them. Shackleton’s flag lay still for the weather was cold, clear and settled, but what lay beyond was a sheer mystery.
She comforted herself that Wilson and Bowers were surviving heroes of the worst journey and that now it was summertime. They will make the pole, she told herself, for with all their difficulties, contrarieties and flaws, these men had become her heroes; that is to say, the heroes that belonged to her. The flags did not matter. The charts neither. In truth, she had never had a hero. Not one who was proven. The glory awaiting an English victory was by the by. London could not see these men as she saw them. London could not possess them. Shining. Glorious. Inside and out.
Once she looked out and saw Marijke on the rooftop. She waved and Marijke waved back. Perhaps this is peace, she thought. Marijke smiled. ‘I found Mother,’ she said. ‘She was happiest at Per Hansen’s house. She was there all along.’ Per Hansen was Anders’ father. Karina laughed. Who would have thought she was the one who would have travelled furthest? That their mother, who they thought so unhappy, had such a secret. Marijke settled down and laid her chin on her palm.
‘So I could never have married, Anders. Do you see? What are you waiting for?’ Marijke asked, suddenly curious as she peered into the void.
Karina shrugged. ‘Men,’ she said.
Marijke raised her hand, three fingers as she had done before. ‘You have three of them,’ she said.
‘No. Two,’ Karina objected but before Marijke could reply, the light faded.
The first she spotted of their return was Taffy Evans and he was a shock as he burst back into view. Evans had always been a carthorse of a man but now he was shaken, gulping the air as if he had only just surfaced from underwater. There were patches of frostbite on his face and fingertips. He had surely not been gone long enough to get in such a state. She calculated it could only have been a fortnight perhaps or three weeks at a push. Could it be more? Could it? After all, there was less than a hundred miles to go when the five of them walked into the darkness and yet Evans was changed. It came to her in a rush – he was desperate, ragged and disheartened. He had injured his hand and Wilson had twice now asked the skipper to order camp made early on account of it.
Next Oates stumbled beyond the curtain and she felt a stab of pain. He was in a bad way. Wilson, as he emerged, was more worried about Oates than himself. Oates had sustained a bad case of frostbite, particularly on his foot, and just as bad, he had not been able to keep up his kit. His sleeping bag was torn and mostly sodden. When he allowed himself to wonder, Wilson could not understand why Scott chose five of them. The pole party was to be four. It had been that way all along, up to the very last minute. Everything had been calculated for four and yet, Scott had chosen one man too many. It was chance and chance alone but Wilson was looking for meaning in it. There is no meaning. But the doctor could not hear her, so focused was he on his calculations.
But that was the least of it. As the skipper and Birdie hauled the last of the sledges into her line of sight, she could see what they had seen – a flag at the pole that was not the jack. If she had had a heart, it would have sunk. It took her a moment to take in that Amundsen had snatched the glory ahead of them when he came from the other side of the plateau with the dogs. His sledges were faster. In this failure, she saw the measure of each man. Evans’s heart flagged, for he, it turned out, was truly in it for the glory. She had not known before. Now he decided that his wife, Lois, would not be proud of him. He wanted to go home to the sweeping sandy beaches of Rhossili the hero he imagined himself to be, not this way – the man who came second.
Scott, by comparison, was tense and angry for he felt betrayed and yet he had nowhere to pin that betrayal. His men had behaved impeccably. They had done nothing wrong. They were the first to have made it to the pole under their own steam – Amundsen used dogs, after all; while ever h
onourable, his men had relied on themselves. At Scott’s heart there was a locked box of disappointment despite that. He wondered if he had started earlier, if he had worked harder, if he had consented to using dogs. If he had chosen four, not five. He dodged the words that he couldn’t help thinking. What might Shackleton have done?
By contrast, Birdie, Wilson and Oates were focused on their return. Step upon step. The only way. At least it was not a close run thing, Oates thought. Amundsen got the better of them by a month or more. They could not have made up the time.
Time? It is so unreliable.
And yet she felt disappointed. Even she.
She looked for the Norwegians – the men who had overtaken her heroes. She could not make them out any more. They were nothing to her. They were gone. All their happiness and enthusiasm and the flood of half-familiar words. How could Amundsen and his men compare to Scott’s party?
Hungry, always hungry now, the English set out to follow the trail of supply depots that led back to Hut Point. But having found the exact location of the pole, somehow the men found the depot coordinates difficult to calculate. Beyond the plateau and back on the glacier, snow had fallen and the cooking oil and pemmican were difficult to find – small white hillocks in a monochrome landscape.
It was cold for summer and she could not mask that. Now and then a flutter of snow fell. There would be more. She could feel it on the wind. She tried to guide them with a gentle push and nudge but Scott, in his fury, was difficult to direct. Evans kept falling like a petulant child intent on punishing himself. As she read his thoughts, it became clear that if he couldn’t be first at the pole he didn’t care about anything, not even his own welfare. He fell down knocking his head badly and over the days his hand got worse. Wilson privately assessed that back at Hut Point he would have to amputate it.
Then as they came off the glacier and onto the barrier after two long weeks of hard hauling with Evans falling every second day as he flung himself furiously in the direction of home, the petty officer collapsed. He mumbled words she could not catch. Wilson asked him to repeat himself and when he did so she realized he was speaking another language – a childhood tongue. Unable to discern it, the men carried him into the tent where Wilson nursed him to little avail. Karina whispered, Come now. You must go home. But it did no good. The force of Evans’s will was beyond her. Please, she said, but he descended anyway. Think of your home. Think of your family. Don’t give up now. But English was beyond him. His words sounded like the weather as they fell from his lips. Not clipped like English, but something else entirely. She watched, horrified, as his spirit left his body.
Deep in the night, Evans’s spectre hovered over Scott’s sleeping outline as if his happiest place might be at the skipper’s side. But the dead cannot belong to the living. It is the land that owns them – each man to his own. Above, a door opened on a place that wasn’t white. A long, sandy beach dripping in an orange sunset that swept in a colourful arc. Evans smiled at last. It was Rhossili and he was going home. As he was pulled away, he spotted Karina, in the corner of the tent, a thin white spectre. His eyes flashed, turning towards the skipper in consternation. He thinks I am a wraith, she realized. He thinks the things that have gone wrong are my fault. Somehow this shadow of a superstition riled her. She had done everything she could. ‘I am here to help you. I stayed to help,’ she insisted, but as Evans disappeared, there was a dark and silent accusation in his eyes.
They left his body, buried as best they could. Wilson packed Evans’s things to take back and silently recalculated the supplies. She tutted softly and he turned. But she couldn’t blame him. This place stripped everything away in the end. It laid you bare. She watched as the line of four Englishmen moved from one depot to the next. They remained animated and from high above she kept willing them on. They were weak. Too weak, she thought. Oates with his injured foot and Scott, with aching muscles, in a worse state than he realized. But then, she had thought that before and they had survived.
Far beyond them, back at base, a rescue party had formed. Cherry and Dimitri, the animal handler, packed sledges, to take the dogs to resupply as far as One Ton Depot. Every breath they took, the men lived in the hope that the pole had been claimed for His Majesty. At base, each kept watch – a glance to the horizon as they made their way to the hut or woken by a midnight creak, which they hoped might be the skipper returning. The party was not even late yet. Karina shuddered. The weather was relentless as ever, winter was coming. The whole of Hut Point was on edge as Cherry and Dmitri set off, imagining that they would meet the party on the way.
She found of a sudden she could not follow what the men were saying. She had lost her English and thought only in her own tongue. Then she lost even that and all she had were pictures. The world is taking me. She struggled against its grasp, but it was like being a bouncing ball, only able to take in what she passed in a flash. Everything fell silent. On the ice beyond base camp, Cherry stared in the direction of the returning party but there was no movement bar the empty wind. Where are they? Nothing was coming his way and the weather was worsening. It had been a terrible summer. Bad luck after bad luck. Blizzards and high winds. Karina flurried on the silent snows. She coasted the breezes.
In pity, she was drawn back to the tent the polar party had pitched to wait out the storm. She couldn’t understand anything any more. The world was a kind of blur. Still, she could make it out. And she was relieved that there remained four of them and Birdie had picked up his skis. They talked but all she could catch were strange, slurred voices as if time was running too slowly. Each of the men was hungry and Scott realized what Wilson had known for a little while, that there was not enough oil to last – to cook and to keep warm. Where are the dogs? the skipper wondered, and thought of poor Blossom, all those years ago, her entrails spread over the ice. That must be a decade ago. Like Karina, his mind was wandering and the dogs were back at the base. He had sent them back. Think, she hissed. Concentrate. For without determination the party would be sunk. They had become too close, as if their bodies are circulating the same blood, pumped by four hearts, in tandem. Moving together. What if one of them dies?
Desperation mounting, night by night, Scott, Bowers, Oates and Wilson huddled together, sheltered from the seemingly interminable summer blizzards, clutching their stomachs just as she had, those first nights aboard the Terror. Trying to feel full. Ignoring the howling of her hunger. This was worse than they had expected – the worst summer weather Karina could recall. It was more difficult than they imagined and that was what had shaken them. All they had wanted was a decent shot at it, but the blizzards and snowfall and high winds weren’t any more fair than Amundsen using sledges and dogs. Supplies were low and, worse, winter was coming early.
Oates was anxious he couldn’t manage the pain any more. His foot was dead and blackened and he was in agony as they lurched from camp to camp. Still, what he considered the worst thing was that he would drag down the others. A party moves only at the pace of the slowest man. There was no question he was slowing them and there was not enough food. He’d been thinking of it for days. In the corner of the tent, he allowed himself another heartbeat before deciding it was time.
He hauled himself to his feet. When he spoke, the words were the first that Karina had heard clearly since Evans had died. I am just going outside and I may be some time, he said. Though she heard him, she did not understand until he had left the tent and walked, like the bravest of madmen, into the swirling snow. He left a bequest behind. A better chance. A bit of luck. As he limped on, he thought, I was set to lose the damn leg this time anyway.
‘Stop!’ she shouted as she trailed him. She tried to turn him round. His words echoed. I am just going outside and I may be some time. Surely there was another way. But Oates limped on – like that little penguin all those years ago.
Inside the tent, the others waited, realization dawning. Wilson stared straight ahead as if he was in some kind of trance. Scott fidgete
d. Birdie could not bear it. He jumped to his feet and opened the tent flap. His green hat pulled over his ears.
‘Titus!’ he shouted. ‘Titus.’
But Oates did not hear him. The wind was too high and he was sitting with his legs spread in front of him almost half a mile off. For the first time in weeks he felt warm. We came to fight, he mumbled, ever the soldier, but when the pinprick of light above him opened onto a scene it was not a battlefield but a stone bridge that came into view, its arches stretching across a wide river. A place called Putney. These Englishmen love their homes. When Oates finally saw her he smiled. It was a broad grin hiding nothing. ‘You’re a pretty girl,’ he said, and for the first time in a long time, she laughed. She had not been a pretty girl in all the long decades. ‘Putney,’ she said, and Oates disappeared.
Inside the tent it was the worst day any of them had experienced. This was a kind of agony. Oates could not have survived long in his weakened condition, but they each hoped against hope that somehow he would make it back. That night they slept at best fitfully. If Oates had sacrificed himself to save them, that act was uncertain. His death was a burden, if anything – something they would have to live up to.
The next day, in a lull in the weather, Scott, Bowers and Wilson still could not find any words. Instead they took down the tent in silence and hauled everything onwards with their supplies dwindling. It was not far to go. Not far. Cherry was near here only a few days ago – ahead of them by a few miles before he shrugged his shoulders and turned back. It felt like a dream, or maybe a nightmare that they could not see what she could see. That they did not know.
She told herself that Wilson and Bowers had lived through worse not nine months before but she knew that did not mean they wouldn’t die. It came back to the fact that the party could only move as swiftly as its weakest man and with Evans in Rhossilli and Oates in Putney that man was now Scott. With the others worse off, she hadn’t fully realized how weak the skipper had become. He always seemed inviolable but he didn’t have the mettle of the men who had survived the worst journey. Not when it came to it. His muscles screamed. His teeth were loose in his gums. His bones pressed against his skin. He passed in and out of consciousness. He suffered without fully realizing it, for Scott, in his imagination, was playing to the gallery. He accepted it now as he scribbled in his notebook – a message to Kathleen. A message to the world. For God’s sake, look after our people.
The Ice Maiden Page 25