‘All the time,’ she said.
‘It always rains in the entrance to the Sognefjord,’ Dahler said. ‘It is a very wet place.’ He glanced up at a leaden sky. ‘Soon it will be fine. You will see.’
He was quite right. By the time we were off Kvamsoy the sun was out. The wind changed and blew straight down the fjord. We took the sails in and started up the engine. The mountains had receded. They were higher and more massive. But they were not impressive. Deep snow capped their rounded tops, but thickly wooded slopes dropped gently to the quiet waters of the fjord. They basked in the sun, a symphony of bright green and glittering snow, and somehow I felt cheated. They should have been towering and black with precipitous cliffs falling sheer 4,000 feet to the water with the white lacing of giant falls cascading down their granite cliffs. This smiling land seemed much too kindly.
The wind died away. The surface of the fjord flattened out to a mirror. The ship steamed in the noonday warmth and, sitting at the wheel, I found I was hot even with nothing on but a short-sleeved shirt. Dick had turned in and Dahler had also gone below. The rest of the crew lay stretched out on the deck, sleeping in the sun. Jill came aft and sat beside me in the cockpit. She didn’t speak, but sat with her chin resting on one hand, gazing ahead towards a wide bend of the fjord. She was waiting for her first glimpse of the Jostedal.
I often think of that afternoon. It was the beginning of something new in my life. As I sat there at the wheel watching the bend of the fjord slowly open up ahead of us, I was conscious for the first time of someone else’s feelings. I knew what she was feeling, felt it as though it were myself. She was dressed in a deep scarlet jersey and green corduroy slacks and her fair hair stirred in the breeze, glinting in the sunlight like spun gold. Neither of us spoke. The only sound was the rhythmic beat of the engine and the gentle stirring of the water thrust aside by the bows.
Gradually the great headland on our port bow slid back, revealing more and more of the mountains to the north. And then suddenly we were clear of the enclosing mass and looking right up to Balestrand and Fjaerlandsfjord. It was a breathtakingly beautiful sight. The mountains rose in jagged peaks, tier on tier for miles inland, crag over-topping crag till they seemed tilted up into the blue bowl of the sky. The dark green of the pines covered the lower slopes and there was emerald in the valleys. But higher up, the vegetation vanished and sheer precipices of grey-brown rock piled up like bastions holding back the gleaming masses of the snow-fields.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ Jill whispered. But I knew she wasn’t thinking about the wild beauty of the place. She was gazing for’ard across the bows to where the snow-field of the Jostedal glittered like a fairy carpet in the sun and remembering Farnell.
She didn’t speak for some time after that. She just sat there, thinking about him. I could feel her thoughts inside me and in some strange way they hurt. Her left hand was flung out along the edge of the cockpit. It was a slender, almost ivory hand, with slender wrist and little blue veins. It was very close to mine where it lay against the warm brown of the varnished mahogany. Without thinking – conscious only of the reflection of her emotion in me – I stretched out my hand to hers. The fingers were cool and smooth, and the instant I touched her I felt close to her – closer than I’d been to anyone before. I started to withdraw my hand. But her fingers closed suddenly on mine. And then she looked at me. Her grey eyes were wide and misty. She clung to my hand as though it were something she feared to lose. ‘Thank you, Bill,’ she said softly. ‘You’ve been a dear.’
‘He meant so much to you?’ I asked, and my voice came strangely to my lips.
She nodded. ‘So much,’ she said. Then she looked away to the mountains again. ‘So much – so long ago.’ She was silent for a moment, her hand still holding mine. ‘Six weeks,’ she whispered, as though to herself. ‘That’s all we had. Then he was gone.’
‘But you saw him later – after the war?’ I said.
‘Yes. For a week. That was all.’ She turned to me. ‘Bill. What makes a man throw love away for – for something a woman can’t understand? You, for instance. Have you ever been in love?’
‘Many times,’ I answered.
‘But not really. Not so that it was more important than anything else?’
‘No,’ I said.
Her hand suddenly tightened on mine so that I could feel her nails biting into my palm. ‘Why?’ she cried softly. ‘Why? Tell me why? What was there more important?’
I didn’t know how to answer her. ‘Excitement,’ I said. ‘The excitement of living, of pitting one’s wits against everyone else.’
‘Meaning a wife is an encumbrance?’
I nodded. ‘For some men – yes.’
‘And George was one of them?’
‘Perhaps.’ I hesitated. How could I tell her what made a man like George Farnell love metals more than he loved himself. ‘Jill,’ I said, ‘Farnell was an artist. He knew more about metals than any man I know. And the driving force in his life was the belief that he could open up these mountains here and let them pour out their store of mineral treasure. To the average person he is a cheat, a swindler, an escaped convict, a deserter. But in his own mind that was all justified. It was the means to an end. His art was everything. And he staked his whole self on the belief that there was metal up here under the ice that you see now. If he hurt you in the process – well, that was no more than the hurt he had done himself.’
She seemed to understand, for she nodded slowly. ‘Everything had to be subordinated to that.’ She sighed. ‘Yes. You’re right. But if only I’d known. Then I—’ She stopped. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing would have made any difference. It was that singleness of purpose, that inward fire that attracted me.’ She sat for some time with her eyes closed. Her hand was relaxed and soft in mine. ‘What about you, Bill?’ she asked at length. ‘You say you’ve been in love – many times. What was it drove you on?’
I hesitated. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Excitement, I think. The excitement of running things, of always being faced with problems that were too big for me until I beat them. I’m a climber – in the industrial sense. I always had to get to the top of the next peak.’
‘And now?’ she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Now I have had my fill – for the moment,’ I answered. ‘During the war I reached the top. I exhausted myself, satiated my urge for power. Now I’m content to lie and bask in the sunshine – or was.’
‘Or was?’ The slender line of her brows rose.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘All the time we have been sailing towards these mountains, that old sense of excitement has been rising inside me. If I can find out what Farnell discovered—’ I stopped then. It sounded ghoulish, this search for a dead man’s plunder.
‘I see,’ she said and looked away to the mountains. And then suddenly with a violence I had not expected she said, ‘God! Why was I born a woman?’
She got up then and went below, and I sat on feeling suddenly alone. The mountains were not so bright and the sky seemed less blue. I knew then – and admitted it to myself for the first time – that I’d missed something in life. I had held its hand for a moment. That was all. It didn’t belong to me. I had borrowed from a dead man.
One of the motionless bodies laid out on the deck stirred. It was the diver. ‘Sunde,’ I called.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Then he got to his feet and came aft. ‘Where are we meeting your partner?’ I asked.
‘Fjaerland,’ he answered.
‘He’ll be coming up to Fjaerland in Einar Sandven’s boat?’
‘Ja.’
‘When?’
‘Dunno. Yer see, Oi only left a message fer ’im.’
‘So he might be coming down the fjord right now?’
‘That’s roight.’ He shaded his eyes and gazed up the wide stretch of shimmering water. Then he picked up the glasses. But he shook his head. ‘Don’t see ’im,’ he said.
I took the glasses from
him and examined the wide sweep of the fjord. There were several boats in sight, but none small enough. I swung the glasses towards the mountains and the narrowing gap of Fjaerlandsfjord. Fir-clad slopes dropped steeply to water that was curiously different in colour – a cold green. On a tongue of land that was green and fertile the white facade of a big hotel gleamed in the sunlight. It was all very peaceful and serene. The tongue of land was Balestrand and a steamer was moving in to the quay. A white plume of steam showed for an instant above its red funnel. A moment later the mountains reverberated to the distant sound of the vessel’s siren.
‘It is beautiful, eh?’ I looked up. Dahler was standing beside me.
‘Balestrand, isn’t it?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘The sunniest place in all Sognefjord,’ he said. ‘The hotel you see is the Kviknes Hotel. It is very big, and all built of wood. The best hotel in Norway. I have many happy memories of that place. The Kaiser used to anchor his yacht here.’ He turned and nodded to a low headland over our starb’d quarter. ‘That is the Vangsnes. If you look there you will see a big bronze statue. Once I have climbed to the top of him.’ Through the glasses I could see it quite plainly, a colossal statue of a man on a pedestal of rock. ‘It is the statue of the legendary Frithjof placed there by the Kaiser. He wished so much to be remembered, that man. He put another statue at Balholm. It is of King Bele, one of the Vikings. There is something Wagnerian about the Vikings. If Hitler had travelled more I think perhaps he also would have erected statues in this place.’
‘It all looks so peaceful,’ I said, gazing again at Balestrand and the white gables and balconies of the hotel.
‘You expected it to be wild and terrible, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘The Sogne is not wild and terrible. But the smaller fjords, yes.’
‘Wait till we get into Fjaerlandsfjord,’ Sunde said.
Dahler smiled. ‘Yes. Mr Sunde is right. Wait till we are in Fjaerlandsfjord. The water is like ice and the mountains are dark and terrible and at the end the Boya and Suphelle glaciers fall into the fjord. I do not think you will be disappointed when you see Fjaerland.’
He was right. Once past Balestrand the gloom of the mountains closed in around us, throwing back the sound of our engine. The sun still shone and the sky was blue. But the day ceased to be warm. In Fjaerlandsfjord the water was a translucent, ice-cold green. It took no colour from the sky. The fjord was nothing but a twenty mile crevice in the mountains. Sheer cliffs of rock hemmed us in. And where there was a slope, it was so steep that the pines that covered it seemed tumbling headlong towards the cold waters. Up frightening, boulder-strewn gullies deep snow pierced by grey, ice-worn rock glittered in the sunlight. In places there was snow right down to the water’s edge. The streams that cascaded like white lace down the gullies burrowed under these patches of snow from fragile bridges. Small black and white birds with long orange beaks flew from crevice to crevice along the rocks. The gloom of the place was something that only Milton could have described. It closed in on us like the chill of fear and silenced all conversation.
For an hour we ran up that narrow fjord. There was no breath of wind. The ice-green water was flat like glass and in it was mirrored the gloom of sunless pines and sheer, dark rock. Then we rounded the last bend and saw the Jostedal. It stood high up at the end of the fjord, very white in contrast to the green of the water and still brighter green of the valley grass bathed in sunshine. It was a beautiful, terrifying sight. A giant steeple of rock rose like a bastion, black against the blue sky. That alone seemed to hold back the vast deeps of snow behind it. And on either side the glaciers tumbled down to the fjord. To the right was the Suphelle – a piled-up mass of blue-green ice like a frozen wave breaking over the lip of the snow-field into the valley below. And on the left the narrow Boya Glacier ribboned down a gully as though to swamp the little settlement below.
The colour of the fjord changed. The green of the water became more livid until it looked like some chemically-coloured liquid. It was the coldest colour I have ever seen. The gloom of the mountains on either side of us contrasted oddly with that colour. And even more odd was the sudden basking warmth of Fjaerland and the cold ice-green and white of the frozen snows behind it.
As we ran into the quay, Dahler gripped my arm. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘They are building a boat. And they build him just the same as they build boats two thousand years ago.’
Just beyond the quay lay the yellow skeleton of a boat. Five men were working on it. ‘They are using nothing but axes?’ Jill said.
‘That is so,’ Dahler answered. ‘They use nothing but the axe. That is the way the Vikings build their boats. And up at Fjaerland they have always built their fishing boats that way. They can make carpets from local wool and stockings and jerseys – all by the method and in the pattern that they have always used. Nothing is new here – except the hotel and the steamers.’
We ran past a little wooden church, past the hotel, half-hidden in trees, and in to the wooden piles of the jetty. ‘Is that your partner’s boat?’ I asked Sunde, pointing to a small tock-a-tock lying just beyond the quay. But he shook his head. His partner hadn’t arrived and as though that were an omen, I suddenly had the feeling that things weren’t going to go well.
I left the others and went up to the hotel alone. A waitress in national costume of black with embroidered bodice and frilled lace blouse stood in the entrance hall. ‘Is Mr Ulvik in the hotel?’ I asked.
She shook her head and laughed. ‘Et öyeblikk sa skal jeg finne eieren.’
I waited. There were tiers of postcards, all of ice and snow and violent, blasted crags. Behind the porter’s desk hung handmade rugs in brilliant colours, belts stamped out of leather and strangely shaped walking sticks. On the desk were several pairs of slippers made by hand from what I later discovered to be reindeer. They had originally been made by the inhabitants for walking on frozen snow, but were now produced for the tourist trade on which the village lived. In a corner of the hall were piled rucksacks, rope, climbing boots, ice axes and a pair of skis. The atmosphere of the place was so different from the islands.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. I looked up. A short, fat little man hurried towards me. He wore a black suit and white collar and looked as out of place as a clerk in a gymnasium. He held out a white, podgy hand. ‘You are Mr Gansert, perhaps,’ he said. There was a gleam of gold fillings in his wide smile.
‘Are you Mr Ulvik?’ I asked.
‘Yes. That is me.’ He spoke English with a slight American accent. ‘Come. We will go into the lounge. You have had tea?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘Then we have some tea.’ He took hold of my arm and led me into a room where walls and ceiling were delicately hand-painted. The place was empty. ‘It is early in the season,’ he said. ‘Fjaerland is too cold yet. The hotel is only just open.’ He ordered tea and then said, ‘Now Mr Gansert, I must tell you that I have not got what you want. Our application for the exhumation of this man, Bernt Olsen, is – how do you say it? – quashed.’
‘Quashed!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I do not know.’ The waitress came in with a tray laden with cakes and buttered toast. When she had gone, he said, ‘First, everything goes well, you understand. I see the doctor at Leikanger. We go to the police. They say there will be no difficulty. They take a telephone to Bergen. I am in Leikanger all yesterday. The application is granted and I make the necessary arrangements. And then, just as I am leaving to catch the steamer, the police tell me the arrangements must be cancelled. They have the telephone from Bergen to say that it has been decided after all that there are no reasons for the exhume.’
‘Look,’ I said angrily. ‘I told you I didn’t care how much it cost. Did you get on to the lawyers at Bergen?’
His white hand with its fat little fingers caressed my arm as though he were a doctor soothing a fractious patient. ‘Please believe me, Mr Gansert. I do everything that is possible to do. I telepho
ne our lawyers. I telephone to a man very high in the police at Bergen. I even telephone Oslo, to one of the members of the Storting. But it is impossible. Something is blocking it. It is against policy, I fear.’
Against policy! That could mean only one thing. Jorgensen had used his influence to prevent the exhumation. Why? That was what puzzled me. Why was he scared to have Farnell’s body exhumed? Had the man been murdered? And had Jorgensen had something to do with it? I drank my tea in silence, trying to figure it out. Jorgensen wouldn’t directly involve himself in a thing like that. But where big money was involved I knew these things could happen – they could happen in England and they could happen in Norway. ‘Who is blocking the application?’ I asked Ulvik.
‘I do not know,’ he answered. ‘I try to find out. But everyone is very careful. I think somebody very important.’
I looked at him. He fidgeted nervously under my gaze. Had he been bought? But I dismissed the thought. I didn’t like him. But he was the company’s agent. And the company was shrewd enough not to employ foreign representatives who could be bought. But still, the money might be bigger than usually available for bribes.
‘I do everything I can,’ he declared as though reading my thoughts. ‘Please believe that, Mr Gansert. I have represented your company for fifteen years here in Norway. I work with the resistance. I build up contacts even while the Germans are here and Britain is losing the war. I do not often fail in anything. But this – this is something very strange. There is important business involved, I think.’
I nodded. ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. I looked out of the window to the ice-green waters of the fjord. A man was fishing from a rowing boat. The sunlight, striking on the green of the opposite shore, had the brittle quality of evening. Why didn’t they want Farnell’s body examined? I was now more convinced than ever that the answer to the mystery lay in the graveyard by the church we had passed. I pushed back my chair. ‘You’ve brought some money for me?’ I asked.
The Blue Ice Page 15