by Stef Penney
He is smirking, with the bashful pride in his body that delights her. ‘It’s not my fault. I’m not responsible.’
‘Oh . . . Well. What now?’
‘I’m tired of telling you what to do. It’s your turn.’
She puts one hand on his breast, presses the flake of muscle over his ribs. With the other, she cups the delicate nape of his neck, feeling the bones in his skull. She puts her lips to the hinge of his jaw, brushes them over his cheek until she finds the ticklish corner of his mouth and opens it with her tongue, probing the smooth, satisfying gap where a molar is missing. Penetrating him like this, she unfurls urgently, an intemperate rose.
She invites him to lie on the blanket and kneels astride him, positions herself until his tip just nudges against the most sensitive part of her, and leans forward so that he can warm her cold breasts in his mouth. She moves back and forth, sliding faster, striving until she cries out and collapses, her thighs shaking too much for her to stand.
The only spying eyes on them are those of the fox who comes to sit on a knoll near the tent, a pretty creature with black eyes and white fur. Flora has named it Imaqa, which means ‘maybe’. Before now, Flora has turned her head, on all fours, her fingers anchored in tufts of willow, knees bruised from roots and stones, moaning at every thrust, to find the animal regarding them with a bright, incurious gaze. She gazed back, feeling no shame.
The weeks slide away, even as time seems to stand still. They work: they explore and name the salient features of the valley they have colonised – the glacier, he has named after her, together with its evanescent lake, the ‘Florazee’. The highest peak, she calls after Ashbee. The valley itself, he christens ‘Onmogelijk Dal’. He teases her, for days not telling her what it means, but at last she finds out. It means, in the Dutch of his childhood, ‘Impossible Valley’. When she asks why, he says, with a fond smile, ‘Because it’s the valley where impossible things happen,’ and she is sobered, reminded of her letter.
.
Happiness astonishes Flora. It also makes her suspicious; she worries about time, about what she should do, how she will account for Ashbee’s death – about the future.
‘I see no problem in maintaining that his death was a tragic accident. Such things – God knows – happen here.’
‘Not for those reasons,’ she mutters. She blames her femaleness, which leads her on to her other recurrent worry – that she is not behaving like a leader, or a scientist, that she has abandoned their plan of work for the summer, weakly given it up, to be with him.
‘Don’t you see? They will say, “This is what happens when a woman goes to such a place. She fails. She cannot overcome adversity.”’
‘What happened with Tateraq could have happened to anyone. It could have happened to me, Flora, and I couldn’t have continued on my own. It was bad luck.’
‘Perhaps I could have gone on with something else . . . but instead, I’m here. Not doing anything useful.’
‘I’m not doing anything particularly useful.’
‘You’re studying the glacier.’
They have been measuring and monitoring its rate of movement and decay, watching the Florazee and its apparent, imminent demise.
‘You’re helping me. I couldn’t do this alone.’
‘You would have managed. No one will know what I’ve done.’
For the sake of Jakob’s notes, with an eye to the future, they have invented a native companion, whom he has named Naasut. It is Naasut who positions the stakes on the glacier surface, who measures the temperature and wind speed, who takes the photographs of him posing by the theodolite. Naasut is the Eskimo word for ‘flowers’.
‘It’s the north, Flora. We’re at the mercy of the place. If you think you won’t have done enough, why don’t you stay?’
Sometimes he is infuriating. He and Welbourne are staying for another season – but they have no one but themselves to answer to. Flora thinks of Ralph and Henry and . . . everything. Freddie.
‘I can’t. You know that. It’s just . . . I have to account for the time. I have to have something to show.’
‘Do you regret coming here, with me?’
‘No, of course not! I’m not saying that. I am not . . .’
Jakob gets up and stalks away without speaking. In the ensuing silence, she goes to check on her weather station, to reaffirm her independent purpose in the world – to remind him that she has one.
She likes to watch him as he sleeps in the sun, lying on his back on the blanket, one arm flung over his head in a gesture of absolute trust.
Sometimes, looking at him feels bolder than the most intimate caress. Embraces bring their own oblivion – they forget themselves, they are no longer she and he – but when she looks at him, it underlines the distance, the difference between them. She contemplates his lovely, urgent body, taut in its brown skin, the shapes his bones make. She knows it so well: each scar, each mole, each plane and curve and slope, the bruises on his knees – worse than hers. She is never going to stop looking at him.
When she looks at his face, he has opened his eyes a crack, and is looking at her.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. You’re asleep.’
‘You look as if you’re up to something.’
She shakes her head.
This is an untruth. She likes looking at his sleeping penis, nestled in its ruff of hair. She lies with her head on his thighs, inhaling its sharp, salty odour. At first, the smell repelled her. He sighs, eyes closed, as her fingertip lightly strokes his flaccid stem – the skin that feels as delicate as silk, as soft and tender as a newborn animal.
‘I like it when it’s soft,’ she murmurs, and feels a quickening under her fingers.
‘Not my fault,’ he mutters, from somewhere up above. ‘I’m sure that when we’re . . . married . . .’
She loves that his body is like a musical instrument; his breathing varies according to her touch. His cock grows under her fingers. Swells. Like magic. A creature with its own will. She lifts her head, and the glossy, bulbous tip strains towards her.
His eyes are shut. His chest rises and falls, slightly too fast. She doesn’t feel closer to him, despite this intimacy; if anything, he seems distanced, preoccupied by some complicated, internal conundrum. And yet she derives a thrill from this slipping away. He is in her power. She brushes her lips over the shaft, now hard and full. She inhales again with eyes closed: under the brine, there are deeper notes – vegetal, musky – dark, sun-warmed earth. With the tip of her tongue, she follows the vein that travels up the length of his shaft. His hips lift slightly, his mouth opens, and her hand closes round his root. Her tongue teases the rim of the bulb; firm but spongy, it bucks optimistically at her lips, and she responds by taking it inside her mouth, where he fits as snugly as an acorn in a cup.
A wet, cold, cloud-confined day. They talk about the terrible meeting last autumn, when she and Haddo came to treat the Americans for frostbite. She says, fishing for sweet words, ‘I nearly cried. I thought you hated me.’
‘Did you? Darling. Of course I didn’t hate you. I hated you seeing me like that. That’s why I was horrible.’
He has a cough. He says he is fine. They entwine in the tent for warmth, listening to the tapping grace notes of rain against the canvas.
‘I couldn’t bear to see you like that. I’ll never let that happen again. I will keep you from harm.’
He grins. ‘You keep me from harm? I’m supposed to say that to you.’
‘I’m as tough as old boots.’
He looks at her, coughs, picks a strand of her hair and wraps it round his finger, where it gleams like a ring.
‘True.’
.
Each of these moments a bright bead, to be collected and cherished. They have a shared past to turn over and polish with telling, but now it is all the sweeter
because they have a future, also – shyly, tentatively referred to. They talk of living in the mountains. Somewhere they can see the snow. They will come back here.
There will be days when they will say to each other, ‘Do you remember the valley . . . ? The fox who used to come and watch us? Do you remember the lake?’
As if these things could ever be forgotten.
PART EIGHT: DESTRUCTIVE INTERFERENCE
Chapter 52
Gander, Newfoundland, 48˚57’N, 54˚36’W
1948
The two of them have walked up to the low wooded rise, covered with spruce and bilberry, that divides the air base from Gander Lake. There are glimpses of water through the trees. The lake is still carapaced with winter’s ice, blotched like a mouldy cheese, but the ice is old and weak, a cloudy and tarnished grey. There are traces of tracks, but no one would think to trust it now. Randall rubs his hands; foolishly, he didn’t bring his gloves. Yesterday, in Trenton, he was warm. She doesn’t seem to feel the chill, even though they have stopped to rest on some humped rocks overlooking the lake, and their breath condenses in soft clouds. She looks at the white sky.
‘It’s going to snow.’
‘Certainly cold enough.’ He blows into his cupped hands.
‘Not as cold as it’ll be up there.’
‘I guess not. Are you looking forward to it, Mrs Cochrane?’
‘To the Pole? Yes. Although I’m not expecting very much.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it has no intrinsic importance, other than symbolic. It’s not new land. It can profit nobody. And we’re not reaching it in a way that reflects any credit on us.’
He grins. ‘I’ll try and remember that when I write the article. But its symbolic importance is not negligible.’
‘It’s a point in the sea, on a map devised by men.’
‘I don’t think you’re as down on it as you seem.’
‘We’ll see – if we actually get there.’
.
They walk back through the woods in silence. Randall is trying to absorb all that she has told him: that she and Jakob met again, in the north, that they had planned to marry. That, after a period of time together (he thought of the photograph; said nothing), she went back to England, to obtain a divorce.
When they reach the road, something prompts him to say, ‘Did you ever hear what happened to Jakob’s brother, Mrs Cochrane?’
‘To Hendrik? No.’
‘It was strangely . . . Well. Grandpa had a business selling meat wholesale. They kept the stock in these big walk-in freezers at the docks. One Saturday, he was at the warehouse on his own and – no one knows exactly what happened – he managed to get himself locked inside one of them.’ He shrugs. ‘No one knew he was there. They found him on the Monday morning. He’d frozen to death.’
‘Oh my goodness. I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks. Kind of ironic, though, isn’t it? Him dying of cold. His whole life, he never went north of Boston.’
‘Did you get to know him?’
‘Sort of. I was eleven when he died. He was so proud of his brother, the explorer.’
She nods. ‘Jakob loved Hendrik. He talked of him as one talks of a father.’
‘He was protective of Jakob’s memory too. For himself, Grandpa couldn’t have been less interested in the Arctic and that sort of thing. He never travelled. I don’t think he understood why Jakob wanted to do it. Can you tell me?’
‘He wasn’t particularly ambitious. With him, I always thought it was primarily escape. I think he was only truly happy when he was away from civilisation. The wilder and more uncomfortable it was, the more he liked it.’
‘What did he want to escape from?’
She walks in silence for so long he thinks she isn’t going to answer.
‘He loved his brother, but he didn’t want to be like him. Settling down. Working six days a week in an office. The same thing, day after day.’
‘But then he met you. You were . . . equally unconventional, would you say?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
She sounds cross, and won’t meet his eye.
‘Sorry. I’m just trying to get a sense of what impelled him to leave.’
‘What do people usually want to escape from?’
‘Well, speaking generally, I would guess, their past, sometimes . . . An unhappy family?’
‘I think it’s more often the sense that you don’t fit with what is expected of you. You don’t want to be that – whatever that is.’
She looks up ahead, to where lights are winking through the tree trunks. The sky has become murky.
‘Of course, there was their father . . . That was very difficult. He could hardly bear to talk about it.’
Randall stops walking. She too stops, turns to look at him.
‘You know what I’m referring to, don’t you?’
‘You’re talking about Hendrik and Jakob’s father – my great-grandfather? What do you mean?’
‘You should ask your parents about this.’
‘No, you can’t just . . . You have to tell me now. I know both their parents died when they were very young. They were brought up by relatives.’
‘Their mother died – this is what he told me. Their father spent the greater part of his life in a lunatic asylum. But the boys were told he had died in an accident. Years later, they found out the truth – I think Jakob was in college. I know he visited him, but he found it very painful. Apparently he was a hopeless case. So, yes, I think he was escaping that, too.’
Randall feels hot, despite the louring snow clouds.
‘What do you mean, “a hopeless case”?’
‘It’s a long time since I thought of this, you understand. You’ll have to ask your family. I understood him to mean that there was no hope of recovery. You can imagine how distressing that discovery must have been, for both of them. I’m sorry. I assumed you would have known.’
Randall stares at the ground.
‘What was wrong with him?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Crane, I don’t know. There’s not the slightest reason to think it was hereditary. I think Jakob was afraid of that, but he was the sanest person I ever met.’
.
Randall goes back to his room to change. He is freezing; his hands and feet feel like ice. He washes in his little private bathroom, but feels soiled, his earlier excitement quite gone.
Some months ago, when he knew he was coming on this trip, he reread the Snow Queen’s book, the one she published at the end of 1899. It is a strangely lacklustre read, quite unlike the lively account of her first expedition. Perhaps this is because, according to what she has just told him, she left out everything of importance. There is no mention of the island she said Jakob and Welbourne discovered and circumnavigated (according to her, the one later mapped by a Norwegian expedition). The only mention of Jakob is in the brief account of a visit made by Flora and the British doctor to treat Mr de Beyn and Mr Welbourne for frostbite. It is bland, unrevealing. You would never guess.
A sustained, even impressive feat of misdirection. It is hard to work out who went where, and when. The book gives the impression that she, Dixon and Haddo were all present when Gilbert Ashbee died – and that his death was due to a tragic accident with a gun. No mention of murder, or the Eskimo driver; no mention of her lonely vigil, of Jakob’s arrival and their subsequent reunion. (How romantic that must have been, although, in telling him, she was matter-of-fact.) She wrote that the British spent the summer mapping the coast of Ellesmere. It is a remarkably anodyne piece of fiction.
.
He leafs through his collection of newspaper cuttings, looking for any hint of corroboration for what she has just told him. Astonishing how many inaccuracies were peddled in the papers of the time. Some of them subsequently came to light. T
his, for instance, from the Toronto Star of September 1899:
. . . Reports have reached the Star that American explorer, Lester Armitage, has reached an unprecedented Furthest North – having traveled for hundreds of miles over the frozen Polar Sea with his sturdy native companions, he has stood within three degrees of the Pole itself, marking another record for the Stars and Stripes . . .
But Armitage almost certainly got nowhere near eighty-seven degrees north. The surviving members of his team returned, in bedraggled confusion, in the fall of 1900, by which time the disappearance of three men was more newsworthy than where they had actually been. Armitage’s men seemed embarrassed to have lost their leader in such circumstances (they returned from a musk ox hunt to find him gone), but their reports suggested that the expedition had not travelled far from land, perhaps not even as far as Armitage’s previous attempt.
There was the odd thing in Armitage’s first book, the climax of which was his announcement of having discovered a new island off the north coast of Greenland in 1892. Years later, Dupree Land was proved not to exist.
What other mistruths lurk in these old cuttings? Omissions? Downright falsehoods? You can’t believe something because it is in print. How did Armitage get away with his claim for so long? It’s hard to avoid the inference that explorers were prone to telling lies because – well – because they could.
The first hints of trouble appeared a year after the Snow Queen’s return:
ACCUSATION OF FRAUD IN THE NORTH
Mr Lester Armitage, the man who reached humanity’s furthest north this year by achieving 87 degrees north, less than 200 miles from the North Pole, has claimed that reports of the new island discovered by explorer Mr de Beyn are false. The records at the center of the claim cannot be traced, and Mr Armitage has stated that they never existed, and that Mr de Beyn’s Esquimaux companions have denied seeing the putative island.
(New York Leader, September 1899)
Here is a mention of the new land she talked of. But Armitage disputes it. (Why? How would he know?) It seems premature – to say the least – to question a claim that has not yet been made. But the Leader was one of the worst examples of yellow journalism (it eventually folded after a number of lawsuits). At this point, Armitage seems to have been alive and well – and communicating in some way with home. De Beyn and Welbourne were also still in the north. So far, the only reason to believe that something untoward had happened was that no one knew precisely where they were.