The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  She slid off the desk and walked over to me. Then she reached out and straightened the lapel of my jacket. “You will be careful, won’t you, William?”

  I squinted at her. “We need to find your list, Darcey. We can talk about mountains later.”

  “I’m sure I’ll find it,” she said, the cheerful tone gone from her voice. “It doesn’t matter all that much.”

  “All right,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I’d better go.” She headed for the door.

  By the time I mumbled a good-bye, she was already gone.

  I lowered my head and sighed, arms folded, staring at my shoes. For a long time, I stayed that way, blinking with dried-out eyes and drawing in shallow breaths from the stale air in the room. I knew exactly what would be going on in Darcey’s head. She would be thinking that I was just another public-school boy who had stumbled into manhood without the slightest clue about the opposite gender.

  But the truth about most ex-public-school boys, those at least who had any interest in women and who had not cloistered themselves entirely within the separate world of places like the Montague, was that they almost always knew more about these things than they pretended to.

  I knew perfectly well that she had not come to find her list. I had known it from the moment she’d asked about my leaving for the Alps. That list she’d said she was looking for was, in all likelihood, already on the headmaster’s desk. It had only been an excuse. So that we could talk. So that something could begin between us, away from the owl-eyed glances of Higgins and Houseman and everyone else in the fishbowl of the school. And when she had asked if it was dangerous where I was going, we both knew that the answer was yes. Caring enough to ask said everything. And when she had straightened my lapel, the gesture had held more in it than any kiss I’d ever given or received.

  But I had shut the door on it, and played up the naïveté that was the refuge of people like me.

  Even though I had known what was going on the whole time, I still didn’t understand why I’d behaved the way I had, because for something to begin between me and Darcey Kidder was what I wanted more than almost anything, and had been since the moment I’d set eyes on her. It was not simply nerves, as I had told myself before. This was something more serious. It was as if some shadow of myself had stepped in front of me, and a voice which was mine but which I had not willed to speak had driven her off. What was it, I wondered, that caused me to turn away from the very thing I had been praying for?

  PART II

  EIGHT

  BY THE TIME THE TERM ENDED, all enthusiasm for academics had, as usual, been beaten to a slow, lingering death.

  At the graduation ceremony, the headmaster gave his usual brave speech about prosperity and duty to one’s country. The fact that there was very little prosperity going around, a conflict in Korea, and fears of a third world war meant that the only duty on people’s minds was staying alive rather than donating another generation to the slaughter.

  After the speech, the faculty and parents clapped mindlessly and forever as the graduating students went up one by one to shake the headmaster’s hand and receive certificates.

  When that was done, I could at last devote all my energy to the upcoming journey. The public having said their last good-bye to Henry Carton, my task was to make sure they wouldn’t be saying any last good-byes to Stanley and me as well.

  We needed up-to-date climbing gear, but more than anything we needed to get back in shape. This meant familiarizing ourselves again with the finer points of abseiling, belaying, traversing, and rope tying and also the less fine points of simply being strong enough to drag ourselves and a coffin up the side of a mountain.

  Our first attempt at training was, through no fault of our own, a complete bust. On a rock-climbing trip to the Derbyshire Peak District, we were so hounded by journalists and spectators that we never even reached the rock face we had intended to climb.

  No matter where we were, the press had us under virtual siege. Sometimes it was outside our flats, sometimes outside the Montague and, in case we were not to be found in either of those places, a camera-toting scout was usually posted outside Carton’s club. It was known that we stored our climbing gear there, along with Carton’s coffin, while it awaited transport to the train station and from there over to the Continent.

  Our deaths or our survival on this journey had become the latest topic of fascination. Evidence of this was that bookmakers had begun taking bets on our chances for success. The odds were placed at eight to one against our putting the coffin on the top of Carton’s Rock, and ten to one that we would make it back at all.

  Our second attempt to get some mountain training done, this time in North Wales, was even less successful, despite the fact that we managed to dodge the press on our way out of the city. We arrived by bus in Dolgellau only to discover that every single piece of mountaineering equipment we had brought with us had either been accidentally off-loaded at some point earlier in the day or, more likely, stolen.

  We returned to London and found a letter waiting for us. It was from Sholto Lindsay, my old boss from Achnacarry. He had read about our troubles in the paper and offered us the use of the Achnacarry grounds, which included the rock face above Loch Amon where I had trained for my first mission to Palladino. Lindsay said he would not be there to greet us, as he had recently discovered the joys of doing absolutely nothing every summer at a villa in Portugal. But he said that we would be left alone there, and we were welcome to stay as long as we liked.

  Having each purchased a new set of mountaineering gear, Stanley and I reached Achnacarry one week later in Stanley’s burgundy-colored Morris Minor. The road to the camp was overgrown with thistles. Bracken, heavy with dew, leaned into the road, swishing against the side of the car as we passed.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect from Achnacarry. I didn’t know if the camp had been put back into service, or perhaps turned into some sort of Boy Scout training area, or just left to rot. What we found was that the camp had ceased to exist. Beyond the gate, all that remained of the base was a twenty-foot-high pile of charred wood. The structures had evidently been burned and then bulldozed into a heap.

  Stanley and I drove onto what had once been the parade ground but was now only a vacant lot, its asphalt cracked and pushed apart by the relentless weeds. We got out of the car and stretched and looked around. Then we walked over to the pile of wood. A fine rain was falling, that same old Scottish drizzle whose damp air no clothing could keep out. Even though the buildings must have been burned years ago, I could still detect the bitter reek of smoke. Then we turned and looked out at what had once been a bustling little village of Quonset huts and tar-paper-roofed shacks. It took me a few moments to remember what buildings had been where, but slowly they reappeared in my mind’s eye, like the ghosts of houses, shimmering back to life in the fog.

  “So this is where you spent the war?” asked Stanley.

  “Most of it,” I replied.

  “Doesn’t look like much now.”

  “No,” I agreed, my voice barely above a whisper.

  “Amazing how quickly the land takes things back,” he said.

  I nodded in agreement. I was thinking about all the people who had passed through here, and where they all were now. Half of them were probably dead and tucked away beneath white headstones in the military cemeteries of half a dozen countries. As for the rest, working in cubbyhole offices or ploughing fields or mending shoes or pulling in fishnets or whatever they did now, I wondered if they ever thought back to this place. Perhaps some of them, like me, had returned here and found only this funeral pyre.

  We left the car and packed up as much of our gear as we could carry. Then, under a leaden sky, we hiked along the old assault course trails to Loch Amon. There we made camp and began our training.

  For the first few days, we hauled our loaded packs up and down the hillsides, slowly reaccustoming ourselves to the weight and the strain on our backs. Then we began
climbing exercises, and spent the next week tackling the Amon rock face from as many different angles as we could find. The early-summer days were long, and often, having set out at dawn, we did not return to our camp before dark. We lived off tins of soup and canned vegetables and managed, thanks to Stanley having brought along a collapsible fly rod in an aluminum tube, to pull a few trout from the lake.

  We were constantly exhausted, although less and less as the days went by. It was amazing to me how quickly the old instincts returned. The only breaks we took were when we ran out of food and made the hike back to the car, whose trunk was filled with rations.

  Each time we returned to the old base, I was afraid that the car might not be there. That someone might have stolen it. We were far from anywhere. The nearest village was at least six miles back, and Lindsay’s manor house, which I had never seen, was nowhere in sight and would have been locked up anyway. The thought of being marooned here filled me with a quiet sense of dread.

  But it was more than that. Although I was too tired most of the time to ponder anything except the physical exertion, in those moments when my mind caught up with my body, I found myself thinking about the fact that I had brought Stanley here to Achnacarry. I hadn’t planned it that way, of course, but nevertheless, the sight of him here left me with the feeling that I was somehow, unwittingly, dragging him into the same death trap into which I had led the other members of the Lucky Six.

  If we had done things Stanley’s way, we would be back in London now and lounging at the Montague. I was the one who had persuaded him. He did not seem to grudge me this, and showed no signs of changing his mind, but I felt responsible for the fact that we were here at all.

  One night in our second week, as we sat huddled under a tarpaulin watching a few pieces of rancid bacon sizzle in a frying pan, I joked that he must be regretting that I’d ever talked him into this. “I can’t help thinking that I ought now to be talking you out of going, just as hard as I tried to talk you into it.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “If I hadn’t brought the others together for that mission …” And then I just had to stop.

  “They might all still be alive,” said Stanley.

  I nodded.

  “And if you don’t talk me out of this, I might end up dead myself. Is that it?”

  “Yes,” I said, staring at the raindrops that splashed off the toes of my boots.

  Stanley swept the wet and matted hair from his forehead. “If you had chosen another group of climbers to go on that mission, and if those men had died, just as Armstrong, Forbes, and Whistler did, you would feel even worse than you do now.”

  “I can’t see how.”

  “Yes, you would, because you would say to yourself that if you had brought along the best climbers you knew, then the odds would have been better that you might have succeeded. And if the planners of that absurd mission had figured out that you were trying to save the skins of your friends, instead of bringing together the best team that you could, then they would have refused to exonerate you from any wrongdoing. Because you would have done wrong. But you didn’t do anything wrong. You did exactly what they asked you to do, and it got botched up through no fault of your own, just as most things in a war get botched up one way or another. I didn’t have to fight in the war to know that is a fact. I am the one,” said Stanley, “who must answer to the ghosts of those men. Not you.”

  It startled me to hear him say this. “I don’t see it that way at all!”

  “If I had come along,” he continued, “then you would at least have had the best possible team. Who knows how it might have gone if I’d been there? I don’t mean to say that I could have saved things. But the chemistry of our old group would have been there. And who knows what that chemistry would have counted for? It might have changed your luck completely.”

  “It wouldn’t have stopped any bullets,” I said.

  “You’re absolutely right,” he told me, “and on one level the most noble thing I could hope for is that I might have stopped one of those bullets that took Armstrong’s life, or Whistler’s or Forbes’s. But I’m not talking about that level. If one thing changes, then everything might change. Do you see? If one passenger more or one less had boarded the Titanic, then perhaps it might not have hit the iceberg and sank. If I had been on the mission, then perhaps the message might not have gotten through to the Germans about where you would be and then you never would have been shot at, and no one would have been hurt and you would have all come home as heroes. Then, instead of it being some unmentionably bad cock-up, people would speak of it the way they’ll speak of the first person who sets foot on the summit of Mount Everest. Do you see?” Creases showed around his eyes, and his chapped lips drew across his teeth.

  I suddenly knew what he would look like as an old man. At that moment, all the twisted logic he’d employed to convict himself in the courthouse of his brain glimmered through the mask of nonchalance he had once used to face the world.

  I, who thought I knew him best, had never guessed how hard he’d been on himself all these years. But that mask had been so foolproof that I’d never thought to look behind it.

  “That is why I have to go, William. Not to put things right, but to put them behind me in the only way I can. Otherwise I don’t stand a chance with Helen. The past will just keep getting in the way until it ruins everything.”

  That was when I told him about Darcey. I had never mentioned her before. Until that moment, as often happens, all talk of relationships had been a one-way street between us. But now I told him everything, even about that day when she had come to my classroom. “I don’t know why I did it,” I said. “I’m beginning to think I never will.”

  Stanley turned out to be a better listener than I’d thought. “When was the last time you had any close friends?” he asked.

  “Well, you’re a friend,” I said.

  “I’ve been your friend all along,” he continued, “so I don’t count.”

  “I was friends with Armstrong and Whistler …” I was getting ready to list off all the other members of the Lucky Six when Stanley interrupted.

  “Exactly! And since then?”

  I fell silent. There was Higgins and Houseman, but we were no more than fellow suitors of the same beautiful woman. I began to understand what he was telling me. After what had happened on the mission, I could not stand to take the risk of making friends and losing them again.

  For both of us, much more than our survival was at stake. Even if our reasons for going were different, the urgency behind them was the same.

  AFTER THREE WEEKS AT Loch Amon, our food ran out and we decided we were ready. As we bounced away on the barracks road, the gates of Achnacarry wobbled in and out of view in the Morris Minor’s side mirrors, then disappeared for good.

  On the drive south, Stanley and I discussed the fact that although we had refamiliarized ourselves with climbing techniques and were more or less back in shape, we had not practiced moving the coffin. Since most of that dragging would take place on the Dragone glacier, and since there were no glaciers close at hand on which we could train, we had decided to leave that part of the preparation for when we actually arrived in the Alps. It was dangerous to do this. We knew that. But we had not been given enough time to prepare everything, and some elements of this expedition were simply going to have to wait.

  We took turns driving, and when it was not my turn, I lolled in the passenger seat, slipping in and out of consciousness. In this state, the image of the coffin kept appearing to me, twisting first one way and then another as I examined all its angles.

  We reached London late in the evening, and Stanley dropped me off at my flat.

  Although I wanted nothing more in the world than to sleep for a couple of days, I knew there wasn’t time. I went back to thinking about the coffin, and how on earth we were going to move it. Sitting at my kitchen table, I began drawing sketches in a notebook.

  By dawn, I had filled the notebook
and was down at the tea shop, drumming my fingers on the table.

  “What are you all jumpy about?” asked Mrs. Reave as she set a mug of tea in front of me.

  “I have invented something,” I told her.

  “I invented something once, a long time ago,” she said, swiping a gob of butter across a slice of toast. “It was a bag.”

  “I think those have already been invented, Mrs. Reave.”

  She clicked her tongue at my sarcasm. “It was a bag for tea. A tea bag! No more fuss with all the strainers and tea leaves making life so complicated.”

  “Especially for someone like you.”

  “Well, that’s my point, love, isn’t it? But when I shopped it around a bit nobody wanted it. They said that people like the business of the strainer and the tea leaves in the pot. People like the whole production of it. That’s what they said. And I told them, you make four hundred cups of tea a day and see how you like that production. I’d just as soon have a cup of tea and have it quick and easy.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Yeah, well, everyone except for you and me, apparently. Until, of course, they went and stole the idea and now a world without tea bags, well, that would just be totally uncivilized.”

  “Mrs. Reave, you were ahead of your time.”

  “I was a bit. I couldn’t help it.” She set the butter-soggy toast in front of me. “Here, are you really going to bury some chap on the top of a mountain?”

  “I am, Mrs. Reave.”

  She walked away behind her counter, as if she needed some distance between us for what she was about to say. “I thought you was sensible.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “I just don’t want to read about you in the paper like I read about those other chaps.”

  By the end of that week, not only had Mrs. Reave read about me in the paper, but she had also read about my invention.

  Realizing that the coffin would have to be dragged instead of carried, and also that it would not slide smoothly across the ground, I hired a metalsmith in Hampstead to install four sets of aluminum runners along the underside. Holding bars suitable for attaching ropes were also fixed to the front, sides, and back, so that it could be lifted or dragged in any direction. I also arranged for a compartment to be built on top of the coffin. Situated at the back, the compartment consisted of three sheets of aluminum. One sheet was fixed to each side and another across the back. The compartment had no roof, but the sheets were perforated with holes to allow for ropes which could tie down the cargo. This also allowed wind to blow through the compartment.