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

by Stef Penney

  ‘Are you alleging that Armitage killed Jakob?’

  She is looking directly into his eyes, as if trying to impress him with her sincerity.

  ‘I’m saying it’s possible. I don’t know.’

  ‘Welbourne, too?’

  ‘No; Welbourne drowned, weeks later, and in front of witnesses. But when they were both gone, Armitage came to take their belongings away.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘According to him, to carry them back to America for the families. But I was afraid – and Sorqaq agreed – that what he really wanted was to remove certain things from their records that would prove him a liar.’

  ‘Um . . . Who was Sorqaq?’

  ‘Sorqaq was a hunter. A good man, who spent more than a year in the field with Jakob. They were great friends. He’d already witnessed Armitage try to blackmail Jakob into keeping quiet.’

  ‘Good heavens! What do you mean, blackmail?’

  She looks impatient. ‘What does it usually mean? If they hated each other before that, and they did, it must have been ten times worse afterwards. What matters is that the attempt failed, so Armitage was furious, and desperate to make sure Jakob couldn’t ruin his good name.’

  She looks meaningfully at him. ‘He was desperate to keep him quiet.’

  Randall stares at her, thinking of his earlier misgivings about her.

  ‘What were these things he wanted to remove?’

  ‘You know Armitage claimed, in his book, to have discovered a new land in ’92?’

  ‘Dupree Land – the island that was later proved not to exist.’

  ‘Yes. But at the time everyone believed it. Jakob and Welbourne discovered that it didn’t exist. Armitage had lied. A deliberate lie. Jakob would have made that public – at a time when Armitage needed people to believe his word, if he got to the Pole.’

  ‘So you’re saying he killed him to protect his reputation?’

  ‘He had reason to, and he was there.’

  .

  Randall sits on the bed and rubs his hands over his face. He asks her to repeat certain things. He takes paper and a pen and writes them down, to try and make them less unlikely. Blackmail, lies, murder – it wasn’t what he was expecting . . .

  ‘Wait; I’m confused. Did Armitage take the records or didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he took everything that belonged to Jakob and Welbourne. We went to look for him, Sorqaq and I. Sorqaq was devastated by what happened to Jakob. He felt responsible, I think.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When I left Greenland, I asked him to look after Jakob for me.’

  Randall must have looked nonplussed, for she adds, ‘Sorqaq is my half-brother.’

  Randall gapes at her, stunned.

  ‘I see.’

  Although he doesn’t see, at all.

  ‘So Armitage took the records . . . and then?’

  ‘We found him, further north. He’d just failed to get to the Pole for a third time. He looked ill. His men were away – he was alone. He had Jakob and Welbourne’s trunks in his storehouse – photographs, field notes and so on. But much of it was missing. Armitage had destroyed everything that could be damaging to him.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know what had been there. Jakob’s journey to the north coast proved that Armitage had invented Dupree Land. But every record of that journey was gone. Every trace. Jakob was meticulous about such things. It couldn’t have been a coincidence – not such a complete erasure. And much was missing about the new island he discovered – that brilliant circumnavigation – so that his notes were no longer coherent. It wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.’

  Randall feels horror.

  ‘God damn!’

  He lets out an explosion of air. He finds he has clenched his fists.

  ‘Why have you never spoken of this in public?’

  ‘There was no proof. There were only things missing. And I was the only one who knew they were missing. Armitage said that, even if Metek and Sorqaq swore to it, no one would believe them, or care.’

  Randall paces to the window and back. The room seems too small, and airless.

  ‘What happened to Armitage?’

  She gazes out of the window; already, it looks like dusk.

  ‘I think he couldn’t bear to come back. Not only a failure, but a cheat; probably a murderer. I told him I would expose him; I would recount in great detail what he had done. I had nothing more to lose.’

  ‘Are you saying he took his own life?’

  She says, ‘It’s easy to do. You walk out on the ice, where it’s weak, in summer. You keep going.’

  Randall writes down: Armitage – suicide – shame? Thin ice?

  She says, ‘He was a tormented man.’

  ‘So . . . you took Jakob’s things with you then. Armitage didn’t stop you?’

  ‘All that was left was personal. It couldn’t hurt him.’

  ‘You left Armitage there, and, then went home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You meant to expose Armitage; to ruin him?’

  She nods, a little impatient. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But . . . when you got home, you didn’t.’

  ‘After he was dead, what was the point? It would only have hurt his family. It wasn’t their fault.’

  Randall looks at his notes; perhaps he has got it wrong. He shakes his head, to clear it.

  ‘But, if you’d left him there, how did you know he was dead?’

  There is silence. He looks at those grey eyes, but she is staring past him, over his shoulder. Her eyes are the exact colour of the frozen lake, the last of the old ice: grey, clouded, dangerous.

  ‘I don’t remember. I suppose I must have heard.’

  Chapter 60

  Neqi, 77˚52’N, 71˚37’W

  July 1927

  In the summer of 1927, Flora Haddo (as her name was then, although it would not be for much longer) arrived in Siorapaluk on the Danish packet steamer Mjølner. She had not been to Greenland for eight years. She disembarked, not knowing, as ever, who would still be alive. She was delighted to find her old friend Meqro, as well and as stubborn as ever, and to see Aamma, a schoolteacher, married to her second husband. After a few days there, she travelled north to Neqi, and eventually found Sorqaq and the daughter he had named after her. She met his grandchildren. They joked about which of the sleek, black-haired infants were more like William Mackie, still living indomitably on in his nineties (she was delivering a case of Dundee cakes and Keiller’s marmalade from that quarter).

  The north was changing. Sorqaq still hunted for seal and walrus, and his wife Megipsu still prepared skins and sewed fur clothes as she always had, but the Danish village at Thule, a day’s steaming down the coast, had an amazing new thing he called a ‘land-hat’, which confused Flora, until she worked out that there was now a general store. There was also a church and a school (whose Danish names were easier to recognise). People were moving their families to be near them. Some of the children were learning to read and speak Danish, and to count money, so that they could work there one day. The packet brought goods from the south a few times a year, so they would never run out of flour and sugar, kettles, tobacco and such like. There was a doctor all year round. People still died, but now when you died – if you went to the Danish church, that is – you went to a nice place called Heemlin, where there were flowers and sunshine and trees (Sorqaq had never seen a tree), and endless game animals that lay down to be killed, and nice things to eat, and you saw all your relatives who had died before you. But if you didn’t do as the pastor told you, Sorqaq said, with a tolerant laugh, then his god would push you into a hot sea called Hilva.

  Sorqaq had something else to tell her.

  ‘A strange thing happened, Fellora, two . . . three years ago. Some of our young m
en were fishing near the end of Jakob’s glacier, in summer, and they saw something on the beach. Something white. They went to look, and it was a bone.’

  Flora looked towards the end of the fjord, where the crumbling snout of the glacier shone in the sunlight. She had once watched as pieces of that cliff sheered away and fell into the sea, but had not thought, at the time, that with them would fall all the things that had travelled slowly, held inside the ice.

  ‘It was him, I’m sure. We don’t think it could be anyone else. It fits, with where he was working.’

  Flora nodded, feeling – absurdly, after all this time – tears needling her eyelids.

  ‘I went back with them. We searched around the whole bay. We buried him up there, on the beach. If you want, I will show you.’

  .

  With misgivings settled in her throat like stones, Flora went with him. They took a kayak and paddled up the fjord. The paddle was carved of a smooth, close-grained wood, and fitted her hand like an old friend. It was one of those rare, windless days that come like blessings in late July: the water as still as a pond, the kayak drawing a dark feather across the mercury-glass surface. The sun was just visible through a veil of cloud, a nacreous disc of blurred light. The sky was like the inside of a shell.

  Sorqaq grounded them on a small beach backed by crimson cliffs – a lonely spot that sloped down to the water, embraced by rocky headlands. The water in this bay would always be calm; the number of people who would ever set foot here, vanishingly small. He led the way up towards a heap of larger stones that stood proud of the gravel. It was plain that something had disturbed it: probably foxes. Unmistakably, there was something white showing among the stones. Sorqaq stopped and looked at her, distressed.

  ‘I’m sorry, Fellora. I didn’t know it would be like this. Will you wait here?’

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  They walked up the beach and stopped by the scattered heap. She couldn’t tell what she was looking at. She couldn’t associate that flash of white with the man she had known.

  ‘Was there . . . Were there any clothes, or anything?’

  ‘No. The bones had been in the water, and were washed up near here.’

  (He had kept her letters. Here.)

  She dropped to her knees in the gravel and began to gently excavate.

  Sorqaq, discreet as ever, walked towards the cliffs and began to search for tripe de roche.

  .

  The whiteness – up close, an ochred, polar-bear whiteness – belonged to the front of a skull: the forehead, smooth and apparently intact. She touched it with her bare fingers.

  (‘Shh. I’ll always come back.’)

  ‘Sorqaq . . . How can you be sure it’s him?’

  ‘There was some hair.’

  He touched the back of his head.

  ‘It was white and . . .’ He undulated his hand to indicate waves. ‘No inuk has hair like that. So we knew. The skull was broken . . . I cannot say whether that happened before he died, or when he fell, or long after. It is impossible to know, Fellora.’

  She looked at him to see what he meant, but he looked away.

  ‘He was never careless. You know that.’

  Sorqaq nodded.

  Kneeling, she began to move the gravel from around the skull, exposing more of its curve. She cupped her hand over it: the echo of a caress. No warmth there, and it seemed too small to have contained all that he was. She kept burrowing until she felt under her fingers a wad of something fibrous. She asked Sorqaq for the knife he carried. He handed it to her, and she cut off a piece, a hank, a lock . . . and held it. The hair was grey, with a slight curl (he hated, she loved, the way it waved when it grew long). She rubbed it between her fingers. It was matted, gritty, dry – but surprisingly supple. It felt – almost – alive.

  A few years ago, while moving house, she had cleared out a linen drawer and come across an old handkerchief – one of a set given her by Iris. It was folded but unwashed, the silk crisp and brittle with a whitish substance that cracked and flaked from the creases as she unfolded it. For a minute, she could not think what it was, was about to throw it away – and then she remembered.

  ‘Fellora. Are you all right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘We’ll build the grave better – a proper kallunat grave. We can put up a headstone. Or we can move him. I wanted to ask if he should go to the Christian graveyard. There’s one in Thule. Or, if you wanted, you could take him back with you.’

  Sorqaq watched her quietly for a while, then walked down to the water’s edge and filled his pipe. He stood looking out over the bay to where some eider ducks were landing with a hiss and clatter of wings and water: small disturbances, little wakes.

  Flora bent down and pressed dry lips to the bone above the eye socket. She had done so many times before. It made her feel . . . nothing. There was nothing of him, there. She sat back, felt foolish, theatrical. But what was the right thing?

  ‘You don’t have to say now, Fellora.’

  ‘He should stay. He loved it here.’

  Sorqaq sucked on his pipe for a minute.

  ‘Ieh. He was happy here – and he was happy up there.’ He jerked his head towards the end of the fjord. To winter’s home; the whiteness that is always there, falling with infinite slowness, infinite patience, into the sea.

  Chapter 61

  The Big Nail, 90˚0’N

  1948

  The sea-ice, which looks so flat and inviting from above, like a cotton sheet, proves to be rough and chaotic. The pilot has to make several passes at low altitude, looking for the smoothest place in the vicinity of the Pole, and in the end has to make do with this field of white boulders – rattling the teeth in their jaws, the brains inside their skulls. As the wheels hit the ice, there are loud bangs, vicious jolts; at one point, the passengers, to a man, seize their armrests as Arcturus seems in danger of tipping over and clipping her left wing on a glassy fin of ice . . . She rights herself. To a man, the passengers applaud. When the roaring engines stop at last, silence breaks over them like a solid thing.

  .

  They set off early this morning, in darkness, and have been sitting for hours in the freezing cabin; keyed-up, expectant, and bored with the monotony of the view. The place they have landed looks exactly like any other they have flown over during the last four hours: an endless, wrinkled plain, ice littered with ice, more blue than white, under a sky empty of cloud.

  Zippered into their padded overalls, they stumble stiffly down the steps and on to the ice. Their thighs make squeaking noises as they walk. They adjust dark goggles against the glare that comes from every direction. Bare, brilliant sunlight; relentless cold. The air sucks the moisture out of their nostrils, their mouths. The scientists assemble their instruments as fast as they can in their clumsy gloves, calling out to each other in excitement.

  The film crew set up, cursing. The cameraman removes a mitten and gets shouted at for his foolishness. The photographer, who is with the air force, paces around, looking for angles on the vast whiteness. Only their shadows show them where they are in the world; the sun flings them down, blue on a white ground. They laugh and joke. Snowballs are thrown – or rather, handfuls of white grit that disintegrate, glitteringly, in the air. It is too cold for snowballs. They find they keep turning to look towards the plane to orient themselves, for relief.

  What is odd – so strange the eye almost rejects it – is that everything is the same colour, everything the same lifeless substance. The entire world, a dazzling monotony. Imagine a landscape where everything is black, or red. There is that about it which defies us.

  .

  To Randall, this undifferentiated point on the Arctic Ocean doesn’t feel like . . . anything. He trudges about, grasping for some sense of the occasion that he can later pin down in words. Its importance is not negligible . . . God, he ca
n sound pompous. Men laid down their lives for this place. He looks around and thinks, In heaven’s name, why?

  He does not have the impression that he is standing on a frozen sea – more like a glaring salt desert; a blighted land after some disaster has smashed it beyond hope of repair. His mind crowds with pictures of Hiroshima after the bomb: the flatness and the ruin; a whole civilisation turned to powder. Only, this is . . . cleaner – a more complete pulverising. He looks around him at shattered ridges of ice, white rubble of every size, nothingness in every direction, and has to remind himself that no catastrophe has taken place, that there was never anything here. Nothing has ever taken place, here. He feels very small.

  .

  Randall and Flora have no particular job to do. He has brought his pocket camera, and takes photographs, doubting they will look like much. The horizon is flat and endless – or, rather, round and infinite, like a wheel. The sun is to their left – well, it depends. It is south. Everywhere is south. It dazzles, dizzying. Randall watches Flora as she looks around. In her padded suit, hooded and goggled, she could be any age. She catches his eye and smiles – a blazing, girl’s grin.

  Flora wanders a little way from the others, searching for a good spot. She squats down and takes something white from the slit in her khaki suit. From thirty yards away, she appears to be digging.

  Randall turns round, his camera hovering near his face, hearing the climatologist shout, ‘With wind chill – minus thirty-three!’ as the navigators measure, calculate, discuss, and finally position a flagpole at the point they have deemed – as far as anyone can deem, where compasses do not work and where it is impossible to say which time zone you are in because you are in all of them and none – to be the convergence of lines that are not drawn on the earth. He snaps away as the Stars and Stripes is unfurled and attached to the pole. The wind stills and the flag droops. Someone does something to it: inserts a piece of wire to make it stand up jauntily. People are marshalled. Randall turns in time to see Flora pat the ice with her hand, and then stand up, dusting the snow daintily off her gloves.