The Nature of Ice

by Robyn Mundy

  The underlying meaning kicks the breath from his chest.

  Malcolm slides the incident report across the desk as though returning an article of dirty laundry. He looks with puzzlement at each of them. ‘A new one by Friday, thank you, minus the creative writing.’

  He dismisses Freya with a regal wave: ‘Off you trot,’ and Chad rises from his chair to follow. ‘Stick around, McGonigal. You and I need to settle this Mawson Station issue.’

  Freya limps across the room and gathers her crutch at the door.

  Malcolm smirks. ‘Or should I say, off you hop?’

  Freya turns at the doorway, set to blow a gasket, by the look of her. ‘At times, Malcolm, you can be a prize arsehole.’

  Malcolm waits until she hobbles out of view. ‘She seems to have eased into the swing of things. Hopping mad,’ he chortles, his body racked with mirth.

  FREYA DESPAIRS AT HER DIGITALS of Lichen Lake. She sits at her laptop, chin propped in her hand, while a gale buffets the studio. She scrolls through incorrect exposures, deletes amateurish errors of aperture and focus, sends to the trash a series of snow-white feathers, clusters of orange lichen, starbursts and bubbles trapped within the ice—all taken with a filter inadvertently left on. The best of her shots look under par, hardly worth keeping. Had she stayed at the station she would have saved herself no end of trouble. Saved them all.

  Freya abandons the ruined images, shuts down her laptop and turns to This Everlasting Silence, her Christmas gift. She ponders the inscription on the opening page. TO FREYA. A NEW SIDE TO YOUR HERO. SECRET SANTA. Not from Chad at all. Another tick to reckless fancies. Going by the fastidious strip of corrector fluid obscuring the previous owner’s name, the book of love letters has to be from Malcolm. Shipshape Malcolm. A new side to us all, she thinks wryly, shuddering as she recalls the morning’s sermon.

  She begins with the photo section, and is taken aback at the sight of an inked red stamp: DAVIS STATION. ANTARCTIC DIVISION LIBRARY. Freya thinks of the yearly library sales at home where Marcus picks up cartons of aged titles for a song. But this little paperback looks next to new. She turns back to the imprint page: published last year.

  The preface explains the conditions under which Paquita and Mawson wrote:

  Their correspondence was not a conventional exchange of letters where one correspondent replies to the latest letter from the other. The extreme isolation of Antarctica in that era made such an exchange impossible …

  How was it for Paquita, knowing her letters would not be delivered or read until the ship returned to Antarctica months later, and all the while receiving nothing in return?

  Freya reads that soon after Douglas Mawson left for Antarctica, Paquita Delprat, along with her young brother Willy, was whisked away to Europe by her mother, to assemble her trousseau and ease the months of separation. Paquita collected Belgian linen and household fineries. Henrietta introduced her youngest daughter to the sophistication of European culture; they attended gala performances and met with her elder siblings and relatives in Holland.

  How fanciful her benign, genteel world must have seemed to Douglas, her image an opiate against the ceaseless roar of wind.

  9 Wagenaarweg

  Haag 10

  May 1912

  My Douglas, mine.

  I’m feeling so absolutely healthy and happy tonight despite the distance between us that I want to write to you. I wrote you a letter on your birthday but it wasn’t a success. I know you thought of us thinking of you then. And we did. It was you all day long …

  I hope you don’t mind but I’m quite Dutch. I’ve never been so patriotic as now. I’m so awfully proud of my country and next year when we are together we must find time to come here …

  I got your letters safely and just when I was wanting something from you. How different our lives are at present!My man, I wish I had been there to help you when you were so worried before you landed. What a lot we shall have to tell each other when we meet again. I want to come with you next year to Europe. I don’t think anything will prevent it. You can’t think how glad I am we came away this year. We seem to be in quite a different world altogether. I don’t think I could ever live happily in Adelaide again as before—that is if it wasn’t for you, of course. When we have a home of our own it will be quite different. I’m picking up such a lot of ideas! I’ve got a book for them. And houselinen is busy being picked! I’ve got some old Dutch brass already and have my eye on more. Our house will be the house in Adelaide, in Australia. Douglas dear, aren’t you glad we’ve got each other? I’m feeling the fellow feeling so very strongly tonight. No more boarding houses for my man. No more nasty dinners and having to go away every night. Always together—I’m a very jolly person to have about!

  I hope everything goes well with you now. We aren’t worrying about not hearing per wireless yet. But I hope we do soon hear. Scott will return about the same time as you. I hope you come first. He will be disappointed at Amundsen getting to the Pole first. How thankful we are that you aren’t bound for there. Don’t you go and stay away another year! You’re under contract to return next year less than a year from now …

  Willy is growing up. He fell in love on the boat and has been repeating the experiment ever since. Unfortunately it makes him sometimes grumpy. Leinte is also a duck. And as for Mother I don’t know how I shall ever leave her even for you. Yes I do though. There is only one you. I’m sure you don’t love me as I do you. Women always love the most and miss the most. Well I wouldn’t like you to miss me as much as I do you.

  With my whole heart & my lips your Paquita.

  The sparkle of words fits her portrait: the girlish roundness of her face, tilted towards the photographer’s light. Yet Paquita’s gaze, beneath her wide-brimmed hat, appears intent, evocative, as one who is only now gaining the trappings of womanhood.

  Freya turns to the editor’s note:

  Much later in life, Paquita confided to a friend that, as her father had forbidden his family to acquaint her with the facts-of-life, she had been very afraid that some passionate kisses from Douglas on the eve of his departure had rendered her pregnant. When her medico sisters had learnt of her distress, probably during Paquita’s stay in Europe during 1912, they had reassured their young sister, gently educating her in the true facts …

  Freya understands, firsthand, how keen an impression Europe would have made on a twenty-year-old girl, reawakening her earliest memories, reminding her of forgotten textures, exotic scents, turning her dazzled gaze to a spring brilliant with colour, willows in bud, verdant fields. Freya feels a kinship with this girl whose family left Europe for Australia when Paquita was seven, just one year younger than Freya when her family left Oslo. She marvels at Paquita’s capacity to adapt—to a new land and a new century, to the frontier town of Broken Hill where her father was the newly appointed manager of the fledgling Broken Hill Proprietary. Were they formidable years for a child not fluent in English, a stranger to the language of a new land? Did Paquita feel at odds with the upturned seasons, the press of dusty heat?

  Did the prospect of the new overwhelm her, confuse her, make her want to turn and flee, clamouring for the comfort of the old?

  Freya’s mother advocates, endlessly, the sanctity of family. Listen to Mama and she’ll convince you that commitment is the universal salve for troubled times. Yet it was Papa who really swayed Freya into returning home to talk through her marriage with her husband.

  The night she left Marcus and drove to her parents’ house, Papa had appeared, flustered, beside her in the kitchen. Is someone else involved?, the accusation in his voice reducing her to tears—the idea of a lover the furthest thing from her mind.

  Of course there is not! Mama cried as if in defence of them both, trying her hardest to shoo him away.

  Freya?

  She shook her head, too distressed for words.

  Her father did a strange thing, a forgotten thing, taking her hand and placing his open palm against the mirror image
of her own. Not like this, tonight, all bitter and angry. Don’t waste your life, choose as you will, but do it for yourself, without cause for shame or regret.

  Then Mama had started to weep.

  THE GALE HAS PASSED, FLOUNCED and fallen, petered out to still. The lingering cast of grey does little to lighten her mood as she moves along the road late at night. The storm has left a residue of grit that coats windows and walls and dissuades her from lifting her eyes. She barely registers the absence of snow that yesterday sat in shadowed pockets at the edges of the road. That the station looks as grubby as a mining camp seems no more consequential than any other impression that crosses her mind, irked as she is by her tediously slow progress and the hindrance of a crutch.

  It has to be the sound, a sweetness of rhythm, coastal, cajoling, that edges at Freya’s thoughts. It has to be the moment of translation, realisation, that makes her stop to hear a sonance of water lapping the shore, a cyclic wash sliding over sand. She turns to face a view that sweeps her breath away. Islands no longer rise from ruffles of white. Evening light no longer pleats the ice with shadow. Before her breathes an ocean, an expanse of steely grey.

  Three days ago she rode across this bay with no heed for its tenuous state. Capricious, the nature of ice; as impetuous as faithless deeds. How misguided her judgment—to have travelled with him, week after week, hazarding risk, spurning consequence. So easy to forget that sea ice is only a veneer, inherently flawed, skin-deep as desire, so transitory as to be scattered out to sea, displaced by ocean, dispersed by wind— gone in the lapse of a day.

  Expedition sei ruiniert

  January 1913

  DOUGLAS ONCE TOLD PAQUITA HE was at his best upon a lonely trail; he said he felt with nature and revelled in the wilds. It was something entirely new to find himself alone and be racked with loneliness. The longing for another human voice made him open Xavier’s sledging journal. Not a breach of privacy, he argued, when the sum of German words recollected from his Fort Street schooldays and the edition of German Self Taught at winter quarters amounted to rudimentary discourse.

  SCHLITTENREISE mit Dr. Mawson und Lieut. Ninnis.

  10 November 1912.

  Wohl ein gutes Omen für unsere weite Reise …

  A good omen for our journey …

  Xavier had declared of the calm conditions on their first night at Aladdin’s Cave.

  Unsere Eskimohunde sind aber fröhlich immer …

  Our Eskimo dogs are always happy.

  Unerforschtes Land das noch kein menschliches Auge sah.

  Unexplored land not yet seen by human eyes.

  Douglas placed his hand upon the words and vowed to do all within his powers for those connected with the expedition, for everyone at home—especially, especially Paquita. His fate he would entrust to Providence, whose help he asked for in crossing the remaining glacier: Mertz Glacier, he would name the twenty-mile stretch if he returned to the hut alive. But he halted his thoughts, for if he let his mind look along the daunting expanse of plateau from the glacier to winter quarters he would be defeated. The goal he pictured instead was bittersweet: a high point above the glacier’s western slopes where a snow cairn might catch the eye of a search party, where, beside his body, they would find the diaries cached.

  Dux ipse, the men at winter quarters called him slyly; never had leader of himself been so unwanted a title. Rather he would call himself custodian, guardian to three sledging journals that in probability would amount to their lives’ legacy.

  He caught sight of his own name in Xavier’s journal.

  19 November.

  Ich halte, denn das Tempo scheint mir für die Schlitten zu schnell.

  I stopped, because I felt that the speed was too fast for the sledges.

  Letzteres stimmt, denn 2 Schlitten sind bereits umgeflogen—

  I was right, two sledges had turned over—

  und Mawson jammert, da er wiedermal glaubt die ganze Expedition sei ruiniert.

  Mawson yammered, again believing the whole expedition was ruined.

  Douglas winced at the image of his snivelling through a kind man’s eyes.

  HE FELT A CAMARADERIE IN cutting apart Xavier’s burberry jacket and sewing it to the canvas clothes bag to make a ready sail—he liked to think that this patched old garment somehow retained a part of X that would help ease the sledge forward in favourable winds. He wrapped the two journals inside their sledging flags—the red cross of Switzerland and Ninnis’s Order of Saint John. Surely the souls of men could live on forever so long as there were people in the world to remember.

  The day was calm, sun-drenched, and he resolved to march at least ten miles. Douglas leaned on his canvas harness and instantly felt the difference in weight. He had discarded every excess ounce, had even torn unused pages from Xavier’s diary and scattered them to the wind, then dissevered the back half of the sledge to lighten the load. With festering fingers it was a laborious task, and the only tool he had was his Bonza pocket-knife. With the two sawn-off sledge runners he formed a cross to mark the head of Xavier’s snow-covered grave.

  The surface of the downhill grade to the glacier was good but his feet felt awkward and lumpy. He stopped to take a bearing, grateful for the brief rest but dismayed that his feet should trouble him after only one mile.

  Through the second mile he grimaced with each step. When the pain grew needle sharp he sat on the sledge to inspect his feet. Perhaps the brain’s capacity to register shock reached a limit after so many blows, for when he peeled off his sock and the sole of his foot came away, he studied it with scientific detachment. His other foot was in an equally deplorable state, the skin a loose glove of burst blisters and his sock soaked with watery leakage. Grotesque was the word that he uttered aloud; he could think of no better term to describe the state of human flesh rotting for want of nourishment.

  He smeared the blistered skin and pads with lanolin from the medical kit, then bound the soles back in place with bandages. He pulled on all the socks he had—three pairs of his own and three of Xavier’s—and bound his finnesko boots with soft leather crampons.

  FOUR EXCRUCIATING MILES LATER HE was unable to carry on.

  Douglas sat on his jacket in the snow, naked but for shoes and socks, his trousers pushed down. With a deep intake of air that tore at the inflamed membranes lining his nose he surveyed the carcass of his body. He studied his cage of ribs and a sunken belly that gurgled like a wash-house drain. With swollen fingers he examined the excoriation of his scrotum, the flame-red skin a startling contrast to the snow.

  Douglas stretched out on his back and closed his eyes, enveloped by silence and the sweet sensation of sun touching his body and tingling his skin. If he succumbed to sleep he would leave this racking hunger and dull his nerve-worn feet. He could rise from the wreckage of his body and surrender to everlasting sleep, absorbed into the radiance of light.

  A voice inside his head slapped him awake. Buck up! it spat. The voice sneered, Do your damndest and fight, you miserable wretch, bastardising the words of The Quitter, his favourite Robert Service poem.

  Douglas pulled himself to his knees and dragged his fingers through his hair; a clump came away in his hands. He’d turned into an old, worn-out man, kicked along by a yammering voice that droned on and on. The plugging away will win you the day, it sang, holier than thou, pushing him back to his red-raw feet, not caring that each step made him wince.

  CRIMSON

  BERGS

  BENEATH A JANUARY EVENING SKY conspicuously dimmer than weeks ago, Freya climbs the steps to her studio landing. She stops awhile to look past the lights of the station, to trace the silhouette of two inflatable rubber boats scooting across an oily-calm sea towards the bergs. Malcolm’s weekly sign-up sheet for evening cruises—first place to those who have not yet been off station—had been filled by morning smoko.

  Her walk up the hill was no longer hindered by brace or crutch, though even after hours of strengthening at the station gym she still favo
urs her stronger leg. A few more days, says Dr Ev. These ten days, confined to the station, have felt like ten years.

  Kittie, perpetually sunny Kittie, says, Lap it up, girl. Think of the sleeping in you get to do. But Malcolm, bless his all-cotton socks, has, in the nick of time, conditionally agreed—weather permitting, just up and back—to let her join tomorrow’s flight to Beaver Lake and the Amery Ice Shelf, the Casas’ final run before they leave for Mawson Station. Adam Singer has a request in, Malcolm had added. He’ll be along for the ride. No mention of C had.

  Waiting for a medical clearance to be let loose off the station feels an uneasy kind of swaddling. When she thinks of deceiving her husband she still feels remorse, but in the next moment Freya is befuddled by contrary feelings too strong to ignore. She misses the times with Chad more than she could have imagined.

  She draws in the vastness of the view, scads of deepening sky and a glaze of mulberry ocean, and look!, out past the islands, crimson bergs unlocked from the sea ice and turning on a spindle of current, sliding with the will of the tide. Bergs whittled and gouged and etched and pared; beautiful, beautiful ice.

  INSIDE THE CARPENTRY SHOP CHAD switches on the fluoro above his bench, conscious of the fall in evening light. He draws the mini grinder in an arc to finish roughing out the shape from a block of Huon pine—this single piece brought down with other, less scarce Tasmanian timbers. He takes a chisel to define the detail from lines he’s drawn upon the wood. Though the shape is still crude, each stroke is measured, the pressure of the blade never once too firm or deep. He pauses to run his thumb over the coarse block of pine already honed to rest on the flat of his hand, conjuring as a blind man might an image from the flow of a curve and the texture of the grain. He draws in the fruity redolence; the Huon pine’s perfume is unlike any other wood he has known. He drowns in the sorrow of the scent, as if such sweetness were his to savour for only the briefest time, unsure now that even the memory of it won’t slip from his hold. He rounds his shoulders over his work and draws in to himself, shielded from the hurt and confusion of the last days, from distance kept, from the solitude of unuttered words. He has moved beyond the crazy-making angst of self-interrogation—recalling the mawkishness of all he said on the night they spent together, then burbling out childhood memories like a broken faucet. He has stopped berating himself for friendship gone wrong, the glow of something close to love as fleeting as a golden night. He replays the snatch of overheard phone conversation with her husband on Christmas Day; in her voice the same veracity once proffered, with touch, to him.