Chasing the Light

by Jesse Blackadder

  Ingrid ran her hand down the sides of the dress, squared her shoulders and went downstairs. The surprise on Roald Amundsen’s face made up for her father’s shock and his unspoken promise of later punishment. She saw, for the first time, how a man looked at a woman when he appreciated her and it was a heady experience. She felt her colour rise as it seemed he couldn’t look away from her and she was grateful when her father proposed a toast to Amundsen’s Northwest Passage success and they drank it enthusiastically. Amundsen must have been well over thirty, twice her age, but she couldn’t help sneaking sideways glances at him.

  ‘Your father tells me you want to be an explorer,’ Amundsen said as they sat for dinner and the servants began bringing in the first course.

  ‘Ingrid is kjekk og frisk jente,’ Alvhild broke in importantly. ‘Wants to be a girl and a boy.’

  Amundsen picked up his glass. ‘I understand such girls can be adventurous without losing their womanliness,’ he said to Alvhild. ‘A very good thing, I would say.’

  When Ingrid looked up, Amundsen gave her a quick wink and she smiled gratefully. ‘I want to go to the South Pole, Mr Amundsen.’

  He smiled back at her. ‘Antarctica is a very long way off. What about the North Pole? It will be won very soon, I think. I’m planning to reach it myself, and there are plenty of others trying too.’

  Ingrid shook her head. She’d known for years that the tale of her mother going with the Snow Queen was no more than a story told to a child, but it had left her with a lingering dread of that region.

  Amundsen put his glass down on the table. ‘It’s a very long way and very expensive to go to Antarctica, but I tell you what, Miss Dahl. I hope to go there too. If you still want to be an explorer when I set out for the South Pole, I’ll take you with me.’

  Ingrid kicked her sister triumphantly under the table and then remembered to nod in a ladylike manner and smile at him. ‘I’d like that very much, Mr Amundsen.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ her father had said, and then the talk turned to other things. But Amundsen had taken her hand most warmly at the end of the evening and the memory of his lips brushing her knuckles was the marker that her childhood was over.

  For four years she’d waited for news that he was setting out for the South Pole. Lars Christensen, from the biggest ship-owning family in Sandefjord, tried to win her attention all that time, waiting each day to walk her to the school gates on his way to work, and accompanying her home each afternoon. But the thought of Amundsen, fuelled by his occasional friendly replies to her letters, caused her to keep Lars at arm’s length.

  Ingrid was almost nineteen when Amundsen wrote to say he was leaving Norway in Nansen’s old ship Fram to try again for the North Pole. He said he still planned to head south when he came back from this trip. The thrill she felt on receiving the letter disappeared as she realised this meant waiting at least another couple of years.

  Lars tried to comfort her. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘I’m not getting married,’ she told him. ‘I’m going south with Amundsen, after he’s claimed the North Pole. I don’t care how long it takes.’

  He shrugged and turned up again the next day, and the next. Thor looked on Lars with favour, she knew, for though he was a long way down the procession of Christensen sons, Lars showed more promise than any of his older brothers. He had the mark of a man who knew what he wanted, and how to get it.

  He took the bold step of kissing her goodbye one evening and before long he’d drawn her into dizzying pre-marriage embraces that took her by surprise and rocked her resolve. They started meeting in secret at the far end of her father’s garden in a secluded rock hollow and Ingrid found it harder and harder to resist him. One night when their caresses threatened to sweep her into uncharted territory, she pushed him away.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ he said. ‘I want to marry you.’

  ‘You know I won’t say yes.’ She could feel her chest rising and falling with her breath, and tried to stop it.

  He stroked her long hair and coiled it gently around his hand. ‘But Amundsen’s gone south,’ he said. ‘Without you.’

  She pulled away from him, sliding her hair out of his grip. ‘Don’t be silly. Everyone knows he’s gone north.’

  Lars shook his head. ‘It’s in the newspaper. Frederick Cook has beaten him to the North Pole. Amundsen’s sent word that he’s going to Antarctica instead, to race Robert Scott to the South Pole. Even his own crewmen didn’t know. He sent Scott a telegram from Madeira saying, Beg to inform, heading south.’

  Ingrid’s lip trembled and she was alarmed to find she was about to cry in Lars’s presence. She turned away. ‘I don’t believe you. He promised to take me.’

  He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’d never lie to you, Ingrid. But listen, I have an idea.’

  She refused to look at him, but he continued. ‘You and I will go to Antarctica too. I’ve already commissioned our ship. She’s called Polaris, after you, my north star. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the shipyards to see her. When she’s finished we’ll sail south and continue my father’s search for Antarctic whaling grounds. You don’t need to wait for Amundsen. He’ll be too old to go south again, anyway.’

  She turned to look at him and he drew her into his arms. ‘Nothing about us will be ordinary,’ he said, and pressed her body against his.

  He’d won her. What choice did she have? Amundsen had left her behind and there was no other route to Antarctica that she could see. She and Lars wed within a few months.

  The following year Amundsen reached the South Pole, beating Robert Scott in a race that became a legend. The explorer never married, though it was said he didn’t lack for female companionship. Ingrid liked to believe he stayed a bachelor out of disappointment that she hadn’t waited for him. There was no evidence for the idea, except the warmth in his eyes on the occasions she saw him over the years when Lars would invite the great explorers around to dinner or show them off at parties. Nansen, Amundsen and Riiser-Larsen: Norway’s three famous sons.

  She’d been bereft when Amundsen fell victim to the land of the Snow Queen four years earlier. He was a genius in the air but on a search-and-rescue mission in the north his flying boat disappeared into the fog. The fact of her long marriage to Lars and her six children didn’t stop her jealousy when she read in the papers that an American heiress leading her own expedition to the Arctic had put her boat and all her personnel in the service of the rescue effort. Ingrid suspected Amundsen had been romantically involved with her. Louise Arner Boyd, an unmarried woman with a personal fortune that almost dwarfed Lars’s, had spent three months and thousands of dollars sailing back and forth between Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land and Greenland. She didn’t stop until the Arctic winter came down and any hope that his party might turn up, sheltering on some remote shore of the Barents Sea, was gone.

  It seemed cruel that Nansen had died too, only a couple of years later. Norway’s greatest men from the days of exploration, gone. Only Hjalmar remained. One of Amundsen’s best friends, and her last link to him.

  Outside the window the moon had risen and Ingrid could see the long stretch of Ranvik’s lawn running down to the fjord. It was true; her marriage to Lars Christensen, Consul for Denmark, shipowner and businessman, had been extraordinary in many ways. Not only was her husband the richest man in Sandefjord – or one of the richest at least – but for twenty years she and Lars had shared almost everything. She’d counted herself lucky when she saw the unions of her contemporaries evolve into sterile affairs, where husband and wife lived in separate orbits. She’d thought that could never happen to them.

  She rubbed her eyes and yawned. It was late and she was tired. She’d made her point to Lars. She wasn’t going to give up on this one. She’d never forgiven Amundsen for breaking his promise, as Lars well knew.

  CHAPTER 5

  The knock at the door was so loud and sudden that Mathilde jumped. She’d been sitting in a
trance, staring at her coffee as it cooled and a faint, milky film formed across its surface. She glanced around, animal-like, ready to scramble under the table. Sometimes people came around to the kitchen window to peer in and rap on the glass. She’d tested it herself, going outside and standing in the flowerbed to check. She was fairly certain her hiding place was safe.

  The children needed no instruction now to ignore the door and stay silent in their rooms. The knock came again and she slid off her chair, crawled under the table and crouched. She could feel breadcrumbs and other nameless grit under her knuckles. She didn’t mind. It was like a cave, comforting, the light dimmer than in the rest of the kitchen. If she shifted onto her bottom and leaned her back against the solid leg of the table, she could sit there for hours. Why not? Why sit upright in a chair, anyway? Under the table, where a wounded animal might creep, felt like the right place for her. There were no expectations under there and no scrutiny.

  For a third time, the heavy knock came and a man’s voice called out, ‘Anyone at home?’

  Mathilde tilted her head, trying to recognise the voice. From down the hallway came footsteps and she saw Ole’s shoes stop at the kitchen door.

  ‘There’s someone here, Mama,’ he said in a dangerously loud voice.

  Mathilde gestured at his feet to go back to his bedroom but they stayed firmly planted. She leaned across and twisted her neck so she could look out from under the table and see his face. His arms were crossed and he stared down at her.

  ‘Go back to your room,’ she mouthed.

  He turned, but in the opposite direction, and began walking up the hallway towards the front door. Mathilde could feel the vibration of each step, tiny shivers that ran through the floorboards and into her body through her hands and feet, the points where her weight was concentrated. She was trembling, though whether from the crouch, or real terror at what might be waiting at the door, she couldn’t tell. Sweat started to break out on her skin.

  Ole’s footsteps stopped at the door. ‘Who’s there?’ he called in his high voice.

  ‘Hans Lund,’ came the answer. ‘Is your mother home?’

  Mathilde thought frantically. The name seemed distantly familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She willed Ole to say no and the man to go away, but she heard the squeak of the key in the lock and the door’s protesting groan as her son dragged it open. It felt as if the whole world rushed in on the draught.

  ‘Could you wait a moment?’ she heard Ole say, and then his footsteps retraced their path down the hallway. His brown lace-up shoes halted in the kitchen doorframe.

  ‘Mama, there’s a man with two fish at the door,’ he said, and without waiting for a reply the feet disappeared in the direction of his bedroom.

  Mathilde felt a flash of rage. She’d punish him, afterwards, and he wouldn’t dare disobey her again. She had an image of caning his bottom, the way his father had done after some serious transgression, and the image was so vivid and satisfying, it wasn’t until the man at the door cleared his throat in an attention-getting cough that Mathilde shook her head and crawled out from under the table, suddenly afraid he would walk down the hallway and catch her there.

  ‘I’m coming,’ she called, stumbling a little over the words as she bent and brushed the crumbs from her knees and hands where they had made strange dents in her skin. She ran a hand over her hair and it felt matted, like a dog’s. She wondered if she’d brushed it that day, or the past one. A man with two fish. Shouldn’t take a minute.

  The hallway seemed infinite, the daylight streaming in and hurting her eyes. The man-shaped silhouette provided a welcome shadow against the glare, so that by the time she reached the doorway and the shape materialised into a big blond man in a fishing jumper, Mathilde realised she’d been staring at him. He was freshly shaven and his eyes were some light shade of sea.

  ‘Mrs Wegger?’ he said. ‘Forgive me just arriving but I have something for you.’ He extended a parcel with the wrapper pulled back. Two trout glistened. ‘I had so many, and Mrs Christensen thought you might like some.’

  ‘Did she send you?’ Mathilde asked.

  ‘No, that is, I asked her. That’s all. I brought them myself.’ He offered them again and this time Mathilde gathered her wits and took the parcel.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and took a step back. He stood, looking up at her from the step, his cap in his hands, and she wished he would go. The silence was becoming awkward when she heard a clatter in the hallway behind her.

  ‘Hello,’ Aase said, poking her head around Mathilde’s skirt. ‘I’m Aase. I’ve just put the kettle on.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you a clever young lady?’ he said, leaning forward. He straightened again and looked at Mathilde.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ she asked, when it was becoming rude not to.

  He ignored the uninviting tone of her voice. ‘That would be most kind,’ he said, stepping forward.

  She led the way to the kitchen. Ole had dragged a chair across to the high cupboard. He was standing on it holding one of the best cups and saucers, and for a moment as he turned to face her, she saw the look of entreaty upon him, a look that he must have worked hard not to show her before. For the past year his face had been a mask of determination and she’d forgotten his vulnerability. The reminder of it sliced into her.

  She turned. Hans Lund, whoever he was, was standing in the kitchen doorway, clutching his cap and looking as desperately uncomfortable as she felt. What possessed him to come into the kitchen of a grieving widow to try to make small talk? Aase was behind him, her face alight. Mathilde put the fishy parcel down on the sink. She’d have to remember how to cook trout, and the task seemed overwhelming.

  ‘How do you take your coffee, Mr Lund?’ she asked.

  ‘Black, sugar.’

  Mathilde gestured to a chair and Hans sat down. The children’s speed and activity was shocking. She stood, surrounded, as they rushed to and fro with cups and spoons and napkins. Steam began to rise from the kettle.

  ‘Would you like me to fillet them?’ he asked.

  Mathilde turned her body away from his and concentrated on pouring the boiling water into the coffee pot, smelling the sharp scent of it. The steam rose into her face and she hoped it was that making her eyes water, and not the simple offer of help from another human being. She couldn’t do it, not yet. If this big man with his work-worn hands started to fillet the trout in her sink, his knife would slice through the straining stitches that kept the remnants of her life together, and the whole lining would fall apart, the innards gushing out like the viscera of a fish, and she would never get it packed away neatly again.

  ‘There’s no need,’ she said, when she could trust her voice. ‘I’ll bake them whole.’

  ‘Very good,’ he said.

  She took the coffee pot to the table and set it down in front of him. ‘Forgive me, Mr Lund; it’s been a difficult time,’ she said. ‘Have we met before? Should I know you?’

  His face fell a little. ‘I knew your husband, God rest him. You and I have met a few times at church.’

  And what are you doing here now? she wanted to ask, but instead poured out the coffee, set the cup and saucer in front of him and pushed the sugar bowl towards him. Aase and Ole watched as he spooned sugar into his cup and stirred.

  He looked up and blinked under the intensity of their stares. ‘I know it must have been hard and I thought I should call on you. It gets lonely over winter.’

  ‘But it’s spring now,’ Aase said.

  ‘I thought you might be ready for some company,’ Hans said.

  Mathilde was filled with a sudden weariness that made her want to lay her head on the table in her arms. It was too soon: couldn’t he see that? And it would always be too soon. She’d never be ready to have a man come into her kitchen and sit there sipping coffee, appallingly alive, while she was finding it harder and harder to recall Jakob’s face. The sound of his voice was long gone, having slipped out of her grasp the w
ay a dream does upon waking.

  Hans took a few great gulps of coffee and stood up abruptly. ‘I mustn’t keep you,’ he said. ‘I’ll be on my way.’

  The children crowded out into the hallway in his wake and by the time Mathilde had gathered her wits they were at the front door. She followed them and reached the door as he went down the steps. ‘Thank you for the fish,’ she said.

  ‘Pleasure.’ He bobbed his head. ‘Mrs Wegger, could I call on you again?’

  She wanted to snap ‘No!’ and shut the door, but before she could speak Aase said, ‘We’re making a cake tomorrow.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, putting on his cap. ‘I’ll look in tomorrow. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ the children chorused. Mathilde watched him turn away, watched the set of his shoulders as he walked down the path and wondered if he was smiling. She’d find out who’d sent him, she decided, and give them a piece of her mind.

  CHAPTER 6

  Lillemor slid the key into the door, turned it and stepped inside. She stopped and drew the air into her nostrils. Anton tried to surprise her with his homecomings, but his presence charged the atmosphere of the house so it vibrated with his need. Her lips curled into a smile as she took off her coat and hung it on the rack. The absence of servants was a second clue, but it was always the air that alerted her first. She unwound the scarf from her neck and drew off her gloves, finger by finger, her skin coming to life.

  ‘How do you always know?’ His voice echoed, rich and deep, from the stairwell. He was sitting on the step, watching her through the banister.

  She kept her head lowered. ‘I can smell you.’

  ‘You cannot. I’ve showered. Thoroughly. I defy anyone to smell me.’

  She took a deep breath, filling her chest, allowing it to swell visibly. ‘I can sniff you out anywhere, Anton.’