The Still Point

by Amy Sackville

  On the second day, Edward startled himself and the others awake with a shout. The silence pressed in again immediately, so that the sound replayed itself over in their minds, absorbed into the half-memory of the clouded sleep that had been broken by this violent rousing. He had dreamed, he wrote, ‘some horrid, frenzied madman’s act, which I cannot set down here for fear of being condemned as such. We must start again soon. We are losing time. The snow will swallow us.’ A troubled sleeper since childhood, he was haunted now by the blood-spattered silk of his nightmare all through the cloistered day. When darkness fell he lay with wide eyes beside Freely, waiting for the dawn, which brought him an hour’s fitful respite.

  And when he woke to this third day he saw that they were spared. A new light pushed its way through the walls of the tent. Edward opened his eyes to the bright silk and thought, perversely, of the town fair’s marquee, as if he might step out onto well-kept parkland, a neat green lawn peopled by longskirted ladies twirling their parasols, aghast at his bearded and oil-black visage. He laughed at the vision and woke the men again, who worried for a moment that this might be some further sign of a loosening mind before seeing for themselves the sun’s return, Edward already unlacing the flap. The tent was half covered by snowdrift, become part of the brilliant new landscape that had fallen all about them and gleamed now like a white Eden in the world’s first light, under a blessed blue sky.

  Julia looks out through the skylight at a blue so deep and clear that clouds seem impossible, the height of the summer day soaring above her, and feels her mind expanding into it, her body filled with his joy.

  Ice

  Just as it is almost impossible, on a day such as this one, to imagine the need of a woollen sweater or a blazing fire, so after many months in the north and the weeks of walking in the cutting wind, Edward could not now imagine heat. The thought of himself sipping an iced drink in his brother’s garden, in a light lounge suit, seemed an exotic fantasy which could not belong to his own experience. The thought of skin exposed to air was an absurdity. He couldn’t quite imagine his hands without gloves on. He was beginning to find it harder to imagine holding Emily’s in his own, her long fingers laced in his.

  Hugh Compton-Hill complained of a frozen chin; it was too numb to speak properly, he said. Nordahl suggested he might keep silent, then, and concentrate his energy on growing hair to cover it. His own beard, which had been enviable at the outset, was now a thick, dark red thatch which he plaited in two to amuse them, a true Viking. Emily would not at first have known Edward; his always neatly sculpted sideburns and moustache had run amok, extending into a beard that followed the point of his chin like an unkempt Mephisto; ‘You would think me quite piratical, and call me your buccaneer,’ he tells her. Sixty years later, when she heard this, it would raise a wet chuckle as she pictured him: he looked more than ever like the poet he was not.

  The snow, blown by low cross-winds, was scalloped and smoothed and ruffled like icing in striations of shadowed blue. Sastrugi: the Russian taught him the word. Shaped with a knife. It was how he imagined a desert to look, it was like a massive desert rose; he had seen them in the British Museum. He had never been to a hot country (and could not now imagine heat). It is beautiful, he thought, as they stood in despair looking out at the sculpted surface. Like an ocean in arrest. Crests and flats, the light trapped in hollows, elsewhere deep blue shadows pooling, or a roseate rainbow in a translucent arc of ice; in places the snow curved over itself, a wave in the moment before breaking, creating a cave that he longed to curl into. Such a landscape is beautiful indeed, and treacherous and almost impossible to cross. They laboured over the uneven surface for hours, plunging feet into drifts that seemed solid, dragging the sleds over toughened ridges that they couldn’t slice through, upending into hollows and hauling back out. When it was possible to use the sleds as a bridge over a narrow crevasse, the dogs had to be driven across one by one, in sullen succession; one afternoon the whole pack halted without reason and refused to go on. Under the whip, they would shamble forward a few steps before sitting again, stubborn; it took an hour to cajole them into moving of their own accord. Boris, dour and dragging a hind leg at the back, was singled out for the dogs’ dinner that evening. The pack was diminishing; they grew leaner and the hunger whined in their eyes. It had always been part of Edward’s plan to pare off their number as the sled-loads grew lighter, and their only sustenance now was their own companions. When one weakened and fell and could not be stirred, it was almost a relief to poor Andreev to be spared the choosing of another for slaughter. He had taken it upon himself to slit their throats, although Edward would not ask him to serve the still-furred meat to the others.

  They had been marching for weeks now, sometimes against the drift and current, so that a day’s labour barely brought them inches towards their goal; but they were drawing slowly, slowly closer. Time was collapsing; Edward remained hopeful and recorded daily their bearing, every twenty-four hours carefully tracked in the absence of nightfall; they were closing upon the target set by Nansen, which he was determined to far surpass. It would not be enough to merely draw a little closer — there could be no triumph in a more successful failure. April slipped away; he had hoped to have come further by the month’s end, knowing the ice would be at its worst in May. They had brought provisions ample for a hundred days; he began to limit their rations, knowing they would already struggle to make it to safety with what they had, nevertheless not doubting that they would. No one mentioned turning back — or at least, if they mentioned it to Edward he did not record it, to spare them the shame. They would push on, determined even as the plain began to fracture, leads opening all around them.

  The ice grew ever more fragmented, the channels widening so that they were forced to scout ahead to find a way around, taking hours to cross a twenty-yard stretch. It was not yet broken enough to allow them to sail, and Edward was reluctant to stop and lose the time it would take to secure the kayaks before he had to. Their legs burned with each step, far beyond aching. All too soon, they were becoming too weak to bear this frustration.

  In the endless daylight, days became the same. Ritual kept them alive; it kept them trudging when they longed to stop, and compelled them to rest when near-delirium would have pushed them on. The tent was pitched according to the well-practised routine; they crawled in, warmed themselves, and prepared one of two or three possible meals, always the same amount, divided between them gram by gram, spoon by spoon, square by square (although the chocolate had dwindled, from three squares to just one). Although they sickened, they swallowed down their ration; although they starved, they did not give in to feasting. They rose as dry and warm as possible, and assembled their layers about their bodies, trying not to look at their own blistered, bloodied feet as they wound them in still-damp wadding and forced them into stiffened boots, and furled the tent and stowed the sleds with their heavy load, and trudged on again, far enough to get far enough, halting on the point of exhaustion.

  Ritual meets bodily needs; but the mind and the spirit, too, survive by it. When there is no land below, just the false, cruel floes that shift underfoot and drag the traveller back to where they came from, so that nothing is sure; and when, too, the division of days is lost in the relentless light, so that the world itself seems to have forgone the cycles that once seemed so sure, a man needs this.

  As they rested, they imagined the rituals of home, the lighting of cigars, the starched buttoning of evening dress, the dinners, course by course, the seductions. Lars spoke of the many women he loved-‘It’s true,’ he declared, ‘I love them all’ — and described each in detail; Freely swore that when he got back to London he would propose to the girl who had once, in Greenwich, fed him whitebait with her fingers, the finest meal he’d ever eaten; Edward recalled a certain unladylike crimson blush. They roared at Compton-Hill’s invented conquests, and Andreev laughed along quietly. Even Dr Wilkinson spoke fondly of his wife, who would be comfortably star-shaped across
their double bed without her narrow husband to take up his strip of space at the edge. And these imaginings, too, were a ritual, to remind themselves they were not animals–a ritual indulged in as they whiled away the sunlit evening hours picking lice from their furs like monkeys.

  Here, weeks truncate into the space of a few pages, reduced to a stretch of wearisome struggle and aching that Edward could not attempt to convey, and which we, perhaps, like Julia, cannot comprehend; it is no common thing to push pain beyond the point of tedium. He wrote barely a sentence each day, struggling to take readings and record them in the glare of the crisp, fine snow. When there is nothing but tiny crystals of ice on open ice for miles, each one a brilliant pinprick, the effect is dazzling. The sun was relentless; they crossed the plain with half-closed eyes and hoped there were no surprises. The clouded sky refracted the light, so it suffused the whole flat world around them, shadowless and too bright to bear. The snow goggles served only to slice a narrow, searing strip of white fire across the brain. Edward could have wept to see Freely’s eyes, too pale and wide to stand it, two angry red sores that he could barely open, trying pitifully to look up at the doctor as he swabbed hopelessly at the inflamed skin with cocaine solution.

  Edward was becoming a somnambulist, his swollen eyes closing before he noticed, so that he could pace for miles in a peach-flooded glow of numb agony. When one of them stumbled, it was more often a slip into sleep than a trip. The body falling to the bed it expected, and waking when its knees hit the snow. Their rations long since reduced to the minimum, he no longer felt hungry but found himself, in this dreaming daze, reciting menus. Asparagus soup, then sole then quail then veal then cherry clafoutis for dessert. How delicious a cigarette would be. How rich and deep to let a sip of port linger on his tongue. How he longed for intoxication, something other than this halfdelirium of roasted joints and great glistening fruit platters laid out before him on the clean cloth of snow.

  One morning, close to dawn, Edward heard birdsong. Could it be that they were nearing land? Had he taken a wrong turn, or was there here some undiscovered island? He could not see them — he could not see — but he could hear them, all around. Not the harsh, distant cries of seabirds in flight, even, but songbirds; it was as if he were lying beside Emily again, in his brother’s house, her forehead clear and dreamless, her dark brass hair on the pillow, unleashed from the complex arrangements of the day as only he was permitted to see her. The sweet, mossy smell of a spring morning on the breeze through the window and the birds in chorus in the garden, the coming of the lark which soon would surely wake her, and her pale brown eyes meet his…

  He lay back and listened, trying not to laugh out loud in elation. In his white blindness they were all about him, as if to bear him up on a thousand tiny wings and carry him back to an English garden. The trills and chitters and thweeps of a joyous choir, finer than any angels could be.

  Freely grunted as he turned beside him. Edward jolted, and then recognized the sound of his restless bedfellow, shifting in the silence. He cracked his eyes a fraction. Yes, it was silent. He had been sure he was awake, that it was the birds that had woken him, but told himself it was a dream, he had been sleeping after all; he would not give in to delusion. However it was that his mind had tricked him, there were no birds here to sing. Not even the horrid squawk of seabirds on the wing.

  In that realm of improbability, the birdsong that woke Edward might conceivably have been the same that stirred Emily from her slumbers, perched in the whispering branches of the willow and trilling through the open window, reaching him across the sea, across the ice, to announce his wife’s waking. The same feathered flock whose yolk-line persists in the chorus that still gathers about the house to greet the dawn, competing with Simon to be the first to rise, their bright refrain penetrating the pillow that is commonly to be found, at this time, clamped over Julia’s head.

  In that realm where all probability might, however unlikely or brief, be made manifest, where the wide ice desert grows false mountains that men mark on maps to mislead those that follow, where suns and spheres burgeon and throw out great bright lances to spear the sky, where banquets spring from the endless barren plain, Edward’s insidious nightmares crept always beside him, vivid against the white wasteland of his nights.

  Hours bleached into days and weeks, relieved by snatches of poor, troubled sleep. In one restless and exhausted slumber, a creak sneaked its way out of the ice into his dream: an ice cube squeaking between his teeth; he was taking a drink before dinner with his brother. Their father was there, the wheeze of his whisky breath, a stern smile; the tonic was bitter, or was it the gin?, Edward was a young man again and had not tasted either before… the ice squeaked between his teeth. Then it was cutting his gums and he could not chew through it or spit it out, it was broken glass in his mouth and it was cutting his teeth out, he was choking on blood and cold glass and his own teeth and his head was filled with the most terrible crunching and cracking, so that the plunge into freezing water that woke him was a momentary relief.

  But the awful cacophony that had cracked through his skull was echoing still all around him, and if he was awake then this was a worse nightmare, he was trapped in a soaking, freezing heavy shroud and the sound of the ice breaking was resounding all around him and something was struggling and kicking against him, and above, a bright white silk canopy descending like a parachute but it was water, not air, they were falling through, there was nothing solid for miles below them and they could not breathe even if there were safe ground to stand on, no, they could not breathe in water, and the tent deflated and slipped away like a jellyfish collapsing… A pair of red-pale eyes met his, huge and wide; it was Freely who kicked and struggled, fighting to fly free of this wet-furred cocoon; his eyes were terrified, his hand was grasping at Edward’s shoulder and shaking it, slowly. Freely was moving with a strange exaggerated slowness, his head gawping from side to side and streaming big bubbles from his open mouth, soundless. Somehow in the tangle of the bag they found each other’s feet and with a great shove were jettisoned out.

  Speed and lightness and no more pain, buoyed by the sea; what a joy it was to float free. Everything was falling away around him. The water so clear. There was nothing living here to see but it was so clear, he could see sunlight above them, everything vivid with a green-blue liquid clarity. It was peaceful, the water was very different from beneath the surface, from above it was dark glass, but from beneath it was so luminous, vast caverns of deep green, a vaulted ceiling of ice and light. He hadn’t thought to find this cathedral here. Beams of pale gold spilling through the splintered roof above; passing his hand through it, he could see every dirty detail, every cracked knuckle and oily whorl, and hoped this cascade of light could yet clean him. He could see his compass, floating too far off to be reached. His last squares of precious chocolate, foil-wrapped, sinking to the seabed like doubloons. Two pennies from his pocket — what had he hoped to purchase? Let it all go. It was hardly even cold. It was cold enough to be perfectly clear. How foolish to struggle. There was the watch that she gave him, trailing its chain like some fantastic silver fish. The watch she gave him to navigate home by, engraved with her name — his Emily.

  He reached out and grasped it as it sank past his eyes. He had promised to reach the Pole. He had promised to return.

  A stream of brilliance guided him to the surface; he swam up through the thousand tiny bubbles of light that his friend left in his wake, elated now, so close to the air, enraptured by brightness.

  Then he felt huge hands under his armpits hauling him onto the ice with a rush of sound, crashing out of the muted underwater thrum into splashing and shouting; with a roar he was fighting to cough and to vomit at once, water pouring from every part of him, a sluice out of nostrils, ears, sleeves, and coughing, coughing the sea out of his stomach and lungs on his hands and knees and then, his weak arms giving way, sinking to rest his face on his splayed hands as the dogs did in despair. Beside him Freely
stretched on his back, moaning, painful salty retches racking his body.

  The others had been further off, working on the kayaks. Unable to persist any longer by foot and sled alone, compelled to enter the water, the party had taken the first opportunity to pause on a rare stretch of seeming solidity, and had rested there for three days while they made the vessels secure, taking the work in shifts. It was a mercy, then, that the rest of the team were spared the plunge and their supplies were for the most part safe. They carried a second, smaller tent, in case the party had ever needed to divide, and so still at least had shelter, without which they would quickly perish; but they had lost the better compass, a precious day’s worth of provisions, one of their two rifles and a valuable case of rounds, and, disastrously, the Primus stove. They would have to improvise to heat water, and without the efficiency the stove afforded could no longer waste fuel on cooked meat.

  Edward, propped in the lee of a hummock, the best shelter they could find, looked on shivering while the others worked to erect the new tent. He was grasping something in his hand; he opened it to see. He still had her watch. He traced over all the fine filigree of it; it was as if he could feel the delicacy of its patterning through his filthy glove, through the numb calluses that were his fingertips. He would have it repaired at the first port he reached, and never tell her it had stopped. He had made a promise to find his way back to her. He had promised to reach the Pole and come back to her.

  Was it then, swaddled in furs and helpless as a baby, that he felt the first bitterness of doubt? Of worse than doubt, even; of failure?