Under a Pole Star: Richard & Judy Book Club 2017 - the most unforgettable love story of the year

by Stef Penney

  After a moment’s stunned passivity, Armitage twists like an eel and grabs Jakob’s jaw in his fingers. His teeth are bared in a rictus that looks like a smile. They wrestle in silence – God, Armitage is strong, his arms sinewy and hard, his grip agonising – Jakob grabs for his clothing, yanks at his sweater, his belt . . . Where is it . . . ? Where? A chair spins across the floor. Something breaks. Jakob has the clear thought that he has never hit a man in anger in his life – why ever not? He makes a fist and aims it at the grimacing face, makes contact with flesh and yielding gristle, and then feels a ringing blow on his left ear and jaw. His teeth rattle, his head sings, he stumbles, momentarily unable to hear, or see, but launches his weight on to Armitage and they both fall. They land against something low and dark and hard. The stove. Armitage lets out a shrill scream as his back makes contact with heated iron.

  Armitage rolls away, holding his back; Jakob drags at his trousers, falls to his knees astride Armitage, tearing at his pockets, feels a square of stiffened paper in his breast pocket, fumbles it out, crushed. There is blood on his hand. A swirl of cold air; another yell – a woman. When he sees what he took, he attempts to land another punch on the man’s face. No more than he deserves. The fist connects, but hurts abominably. There is numbness in his head. Armitage’s face is twisted. Red teeth . . . An arm goes round Jakob’s chest and he finds himself dragged backwards. Men are shouting.

  .

  Kussuk is leaning over Armitage, who slowly sits up, shaking his head. He is speaking, but Jakob can’t hear for the ringing in his head.

  ‘Is that it?’ he is shouting, holding the photograph in front of him. ‘Is that it? You unspeakable . . .’

  The arms around his waist are Sorqaq’s. Jakob goes limp and turns away, freeing himself. Amazed faces stare at them both. Jakob looks down at Armitage. Blood flows from his nose, staining his moustache and beard a deeper red. He looks up at Jakob, eyes burning like lamps in a house where someone has died.

  ‘Get out,’ says Jakob. It comes out as a weird mumble.

  In silence, Kussuk helps Armitage to his feet, whereupon he shakes off his arm and tugs at his disordered clothing. One of his sleeves hangs by threads. His shirt is dragged out of his trousers, the breast pocket almost ripped off. He walks stiffly to the door and goes out. He doesn’t look round.

  Sorqaq looks at Jakob. ‘What happened? Are you all right? Did he attack you?’

  Sorqaq is not accustomed to thinking of Jakob as a man of violence. It is not how Jakob thinks of himself. He sits heavily at the table and shakes his head. It can’t be real. The fight between him and Armitage can’t have happened. And yet, apparently, it has. The crushed photograph that Armitage stole is still in his fist – the fist he hit Armitage with, breaking his nose, from the look of him. It throbs hotly, the fingers already swelling.

  ‘Ah . . . I . . . He tried to steal something of mine.’

  Sorqaq nods, and exchanges a knowing glance with Meqro.

  ‘Will you go and make sure they leave?’

  His gaze falls on the rifle hanging on the wall. Good thing he didn’t think of it before now. God knows, he was angry enough . . . Is angry enough. He can’t seem to loosen his fist.

  Unable to sit there, not knowing what is happening, Jakob pulls himself to his feet and follows Sorqaq. The whole village is outside, talking, gesticulating and watching as the visitors load up their sleds in the darkness. The dogs make their own cacophony, eager to be off. The atmosphere is excited, almost festive, with an undertow of alarm. Jakob stands back from the others, feeling their eyes turn towards him, hears them muttering. But nothing, not even something as extraordinary as a fight between two kallunat can make an Eskimo hurry when he isn’t ready. The tall figure that is Armitage bends over his sled, tugs on cords. He doesn’t look at anyone. His two hunters argue about something to do with the dogs. Jakob watches, until embarrassment and cold overcome him, and he goes back inside.

  .

  By the time Armitage has left, Jakob’s whole body aches. Every muscle feels as though it has been put through a mangle. His jaw is swollen and tender; two of his teeth are loose and he has the taste of blood in his mouth. His right hand hangs like a heavy club. But, at first, reaction makes him euphoric. I won! he thinks. I had to fight and I won . . . He replays the fight over and over in his head, each grab and blow . . . although large parts seem to be missing. Admittedly, he was lucky. Then the euphoria fades.

  .

  Alone in the darkroom, he smooths out the crumpled photograph. It shows Flora sitting on a blanket in the sun, their tent in the background, her knees folded to one side, smiling up at the camera with a look that pierces him – she never looked more carefree, or more trusting. It captures the essence of Onmogelijk Dal. Their place. It is that, even more than her nakedness, that makes him tremble with anger and shame. You can see in her face what they found.

  When Welbourne returns from his walrus hunt, bearing tusks, the pelt of a fine bear and stories of his near drowning, Jakob tells him about the bizarre incident, and Welbourne laughs. He makes him recount the fight in detail, terms it the sporting event of the season, and is sorry he missed it. He treats the whole thing so lightly that Jakob ends up laughing too. The fight with Lester – but especially the fact that he appears to have won – takes on the quality of a vivid, unbelievable dream.

  ‘He won’t come back,’ says Welbourne. ‘He’ll be too humiliated.’

  Jakob agrees. He thinks Armitage is afraid of him, having been seen in such a light. Anyway, from now on, they will be on their guard. He thinks of him less and less, and soon, barely at all.

  .

  There is another visitor, before the turn of the year. Jakob has not seen Aniguin since the summer. He brings his new wife – very young and silent – to show off. They sit around the table, eating and smoking, then Aniguin says, ‘I have to ask you something, te Peyn. About the bad men.’

  ‘What bad men?’

  ‘The bad men that Fellora wants to bring here. When will this happen?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Aniguin . . .’

  .

  Then he remembers what Flora told him in Onmogelijk Dal: that Ashbee was the agent of those who wanted to build a penal colony in the Arctic. She hadn’t known, when he signed up, and thought it both unworkable and abhorrent. (‘But without the money he brought, I wouldn’t have been able to come.’) Later, as they watched a snow bunting on her nest, a few feet away, she said, ‘I’m glad he never got to see this. I’ll never tell anyone. They won’t spoil it.’

  .

  ‘It’s not what you think, Aniguin . . . Who told you that?’

  ‘Tateraq. Ashbee told him – when he and Fellora and Tateraq were on Umingmak Nuna. He told my brother bad men would come and live here – kallunat thieves and murderers – and we would be their servants. Tateraq was afraid, so he killed him, to stop them, but he did not want to shoot Fellora.’

  Jakob is stunned. Welbourne stares; Jakob had not shared this confidence.

  ‘Aniguin, no, that will not happen. Ashbee was wrong; he didn’t know this place, and Flora would never have allowed it. That’s why he killed Ashbee? Is that what he said?’

  ‘He was trying to protect us. But perhaps . . .’ Aniguin shrugs. ‘We cannot stop you coming here; we have to change . . .’

  Jakob shakes his head. ‘Not like that, Aniguin, I swear. It was a mistake. It was only Ashbee who thought that. Not Fellora. Or Dixon, or Haddo. None of them knew before he came. That will not happen.’

  Aniguin looks at him with his shrewd gaze.

  ‘The kallunat will do what they want. I don’t mean you, te Peyn, but others – men like Armitay. You have guns and everything. You are implacable. We are only silly Inuit.’

  Jakob shakes his head, and smiles, wanting to disagree, but his main thought is, His death wasn’t her fault, after all . .
. If only I could tell her now . . .

  Aniguin shrugs. ‘Ayornamut.’

  It cannot be otherwise.

  But life in Neqi, this winter, is good: convivial and busy. Jakob chooses a white puppy – granddaughter of the shit-eating cannibal – as a wedding present for Flora. He names it Imaqa, and it shows an aptitude for learning tricks. At Christmas, they throw a party for the whole village; it goes on for two days. Everyone drinks to Jakob and Flora, several times over. He remembers last Christmas – the unhappiness of it, when he watched Welbourne exercising his considerable charms, and thought, She is bound to fall in love with the handsome bastard . . . How good it is, sometimes, to be wrong.

  .

  He misses Flora, but since he has faith, it is, on the whole, a pleasurable ache. He and Welbourne have become close: he enjoys his company, and that of Sorqaq and his other friends. His fluency in their language improves. He has his work: he writes up his field notes from the summer, starts to write an account of the circumnavigation; and he indulges in a certain amount of self-congratulation. He experiments with the camera – tries to capture the Siren-like aurora, the effects of winter half-light. The results are frustratingly uneven, but in the summer he took photographs of the valley, of the lake, and of caves and tunnels in the glacier, which he is proud to show the others. He made a record of something that cannot last, that even now no longer exists, but he has done it: caught the essence of something fleeting and sublime.

  .

  And then there are the photographs that he shows to no one: of her, in the valley. There are photographs of himself, as well, that she took. Unnerving to see himself like this – as she sees him. Astonishing but . . . not unpleasant. Each time he pulls a print from the water bath, he shuts his eyes to remember the moment with greater clarity – opens them, to look at what she is remembering – shuttling between past and present, between he and she. He understands that this is how he has always felt: as though the distance between them is meaningless.

  Between past, present . . . and future. He believes the question she asked him, years before – ‘Is it really possible?’ – has been answered.

  PART NINE: THUBAN IN DRACO

  Chapter 55

  Gander, Newfoundland, 48˚57’N, 54˚36’W

  1948

  When the next report comes over the wire, from Station Eureka on Ellesmere Island, the weather forecast has worsened – poor visibility, snow and winds. They are informed that the flight has been delayed until the following day – if conditions permit. Inside the base, the atmosphere has likewise deteriorated: the scientists start to grumble about the valuable time they are wasting.

  Flora walks slowly back to her room. Last night, she barely slept. She had forgotten how hard it is to sleep when it is not truly dark. She could have closed the blinds, but wanted to look at the stars. She watched the sky slowly lighten.

  At one point, Gemini – the Eskimo doorway – was perfectly framed in the window. Aniguin had likened him and her to the twin stars; she was enchanted, and never forgot. Could he still be alive? The latest she knew of him was on her most recent visit – eight years ago – when she heard he had moved to Thule, the trading post, and converted to Christianity. This last, she took with a pinch of salt.

  Talking to the young man has exhausted her. She said things today that she has never said to anyone. She tried to be truthful, while protecting them – her most precious jewel. She always believed that, by keeping it hidden, she was sheltering it, keeping it intact; but now, talking about him has brought a deluge of memory, more vivid and overwhelming than she has experienced for years. After all this time, things have become . . . slippery. Sometimes, she doesn’t know where she is, or when.

  .

  The window is suddenly full of tiny white flecks that spiral and float downward, each lonely spicule reaching for another with outstretched arms . . . and clotting, and clumping, and falling.

  In Gander, it has started to snow.

  Do you remember the lake?

  (Strange, it sounds exactly like him.)

  When you nearly killed yourself?

  Of course. How could I forget?

  The colours of the glacier lake, caught between the ice and the dark hillside: sometimes a milky turquoise, sometimes the green of polished agate, sometimes – rarely – the hot blue of cornflowers. He named it after her, and it held her in its spell. Its opacity frustrated her gaze, increased its allure. After days of contemplating her foolishness, and her desire, she tried swimming in it – with painful, paralysing consequences. The floor of the lake was ice – where it had a floor. Then it shelved away into invisible depths. Its cold was not like the bright, snapping cold of the river where they – quickly – washed, but crushing and brutal, like iron swords. He rescued her. It was the one instance where his anger delighted her. He had carried her all the way back to the tent, despite her shivered protests that she was too heavy, that he would strain his back (he had). She remembers the hardness of his arms, the pounding of his heart through her ribs, the crease pinched in his forehead. It was the anger of fear, of love. The medium she had stepped into, feeling its silken, deadly embrace that numbed her limbs and choked her breath – it wasn’t water, after all; it was liquid ice.

  In the tent he said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’

  He was chafing her cold flesh; for once, she could barely feel him.

  She said, dreamily, ‘But you would save me again. And pick me up, and carry me again.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to let you fall.’

  But that is what she had done to him.

  .

  After the lake drained away, they walked into the glacier. The shoulder of hillside plunged into an empty socket of ice: pale green walls; dank, gravel floor. At one end, a dark slit beckoned: the mouth that had swallowed the lake. Stepping inside the tunnel mouth was to go from one world to another – one where the air was hard, with a harsh smell and metallic chill. Inside the ice was silence. If you put out your hand to touch the walls, they felt dry. Sometimes the ice was rough, opaque, granular; sometimes, so smooth it was barely there at all. Glossy crevices, cracks filled with frozen water, tinged with indescribable colours, revealed fault lines and bubbles, held suspended within them tiny fragments of gravel, or vegetable matter, or dust. Or, once, a drowned mosquito, enshrined in lifeless perfection.

  They walked further in. The space swelled and shrank. Bullied and caressed by water, the ice had made shapes like nothing she had seen, no human architecture: bubbling and rounded, rippled like the roof of a mouth; bowl-like concavities, bulbous swellings, sharp ridges; gleaming, glassy. And the light . . . bleeding softly through the ceiling, revealing weakness, drawing their eyes upward. And in the unexpected high chamber halfway down, there was a fissure in the glacier surface – a chimney worn by surface melt. At certain times of day, the sun sent its sword into the glacier’s heart; its rays found them out like the gaze of God.

  Flora had the unsettling sense of being inside a living body, something that had, on an infinitely greater scale, its own perception of time, on which they – tiny, darting specks trapped in its gullet – barely registered. Some creature of unimaginable vastness and slowness, terrifyingly patient. Sometimes the ice would creak or crack, groan or hiss. Inexplicable currents of air wafted past them, as though, once in a while, it breathed.

  Despite the unearthly beauty, she was twitchy, could not shake off a nervousness as the ceiling pressed down on them the further they went. Jakob crawled on alone under the lowering roof until he was lost to sight and hearing. He refused to take the rope – it would only snag on the rough floor. After what seemed an age, she shouted to him, and there was no reply. She was cold, waiting. She crawled into the narrowing crack as far as she could bear, shouted herself hoarse. Tears froze before they could fall. At last, she heard something, and called out to him. When he crawled out, he was shaking with col
d. He had got stuck in a particularly tight spot and became disoriented in the darkness. He laughed, but she knew he had been afraid. As they walked out, they came to a smooth stretch of wall just as the sun illuminated it with gorgeous striations of colour, as though cobalt pigment had seeped from above, saturating the lowest levels. He asked her to take a photograph (his hands were too cold). Then he wrapped his arms round her from behind, put on a terrible English accent and quoted a passage they both knew from Tyndall:

  ‘Could our vision penetrate the body of the glacier, we should find that the change from white to blue consists in the gradual expulsion of air. Whiteness results from the intimate and irregular mixture of air and a transparent solid, a crushed diamond would resemble snow . . .’

  When he said ‘intimate and irregular’, he buried his face in her neck. His skin felt like ice.

  Instead of laughing, she wrested herself away.

  ‘We have to hurry. You need something hot.’

  ‘Flora, it’s all right. No damage done.’

  Buoyant with relief, he smiled. She could not smile. He had never been happier.

  .

  When they got back to camp, his hands were aching. He still felt cold as they got into bed and he wrapped himself around her, pressed every inch of his body against her bare flesh. She willed her warmth into him and felt the shudders of cold lessen. Separateness seemed a thing of the past, as though they shared the same blood.

  She said to the tent wall, ‘I kept thinking, What if he doesn’t come back? I couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘Shh. I’ll always come back.’ His arms tightened around her, and he nuzzled the nape of her neck. ‘I like that you worry about me. I worry about you, too.’

  ‘If the roof had fallen in, or something, I couldn’t have saved you.’

  ‘Glaciers don’t do that.’

  ‘I wish you were coming with me.’

  They had talked about her imminent return to England. Both agreed that his presence there could serve no purpose. Besides, he couldn’t afford it.