The Still Point

by Amy Sackville

Freely sat slumped against Edward, spent by his effort to reach the surface, unable to stay upright on his own. After an hour, Edward felt a twitch against him, heard what he thought was a tiny sob; but shifting so that he could see his friend’s face, careful not to let him flop forward into the snow, he saw that it was laughter that shook Freely’s wasted frame. A smile that opened alarming red cracks in his chapped lips, horrible against the black and the crusted white of dead skin, and a hacking chuckle, half a shiver, that ripped at his exhausted ribcage.

  ‘I’m glad to see you in good spirits, Samuel,’ said Edward with an effort.

  ‘I was thinking’ — Freely could barely speak for gasping — ‘I was thinking of the lass at the Trafalgar Tavern. H… Hat…Ha, haha, do you remember? With the red ringlets? At the Trafalgar? Ha… Hattie?’

  ‘Was that her name, Sam? Hattie? I remember the girl.’

  ‘Hat-at-at at the Tavern… come sit on my knee… I’ll be your sailor come back from the seeea…’

  At this, Freely collapsed in an agony of cackles, leaning against Edward with a hand to his chest.

  ‘Oh God, God, Edward, I think my lungs will burst… do you think young Hattie would care to sit on my lap now, Edward? All skin and bone and my hands all black?’

  ‘She’d sit there gladly and feed you whitebait with her fingers, Sam. As would any woman.’ Edward forced a laugh that rent his racked throat to tatters. ‘Yours will be the most desirable lap in England when we return.’

  And seeing that Wilkinson was beckoning them, he got to his knees and with a great heave dragged his old friend to his feet and staggered towards the small tent, managing four steps supporting both of them before tottering forward and feeling Nordahl lift the weight from about his shoulders.

  Once inside the tent, they couldn’t get warm for hours. They stripped their wet clothes, lit a precious fire and huddled together in every spare set of woollen underwear they could find, in Wilkinson and Compton-Hill’s bag. The boy, curiously eager and bright-eyed, had set to work with the doctor on making a new one out of furs and sealskin. Edward lay beside his friend and watched his blue lips chatter. He held him tightly, felt his body jerk against him, the cold in his joints now, in his kidneys; he seemed to only grow colder the longer they lay there. Edward imagined icy caverns for lungs, every breath frosting them over, like the empty saloon of an abandoned ship. They swam in and out of sleep, rocking on troubled seas, falling again and again through the ice and waking with violent starts before almost immediately drifting back under. In the restless stretches of that long, bright night, Edward watched as Freely’s eyelids flickered as if under the weight of the dark purple greasepaint that seemed to coat them, and his heart, too, beat like some desperate creature trapped between the palms, banging against Edward’s own chest where he clasped him close. At last, seeing his friend drift off, Edward slept, exhausted, for no more than an hour, he thought; he woke to the same hard light and wondered blankly how much time had passed and remembered his broken watch as he came to, and found that he held a corpse in his arms.

  Edward’s diary was preserved in its aluminium case at his breast; but his fingers and his heart were too numb to make much account of his grief that day. A note, merely, of what was lost: the tent, the equipment, one man. Two days later they were ready to set out again. He writes:

  The kayaks are secure. We have killed the last of the dogs, we cannot risk capsizing and they are of little use alive to us now; we have taken two aboard but hope we will not have need of them. Freely is gone, the ice grows ever more intractable, and it would be madness to push on. With fractured eyes and sodden instruments I take our bearing to be 86° 31’; if I am right then we have outstripped Nansen. We stand farther north now than any man has, and that shall be my achievement, the seventeen fractions of a degree my friend died for. Today we turn south to seek land. On this, the 30th June, 1901, Edward Mackley turns back.

  How noble he sounds in defeat. The disappointment so honestly borne. Here is the turning point in the tragedy, the moment of capitulation which signals the coming fall; Julia, turning back with them, feels her heart sink as it always has with a heavy relish. Edward turns back but he will never find his home, where his wife waits expectant now, thinking she will see him before the year is out. But now, in the half-daze of the afternoon heat, in the house where Emily waited, Julia hears a whisper, what he could not bear to write: ‘Emily, I did not reach it.’

  But I was waiting, I was waiting for you there at the still point, outstretched…

  He did not reach it, or come back to her. He could not even be sure how far he had gone, and even if his reading were true then, when they dug up his dead body at last, it no longer mattered, it had long been surpassed; and as she listened to his tale on her deathbed, this was the truth she learned after so long waiting: Edward Mackley turns back.

  Seals and sailing

  When the weather was clear they pushed on for hours at a stretch against unknown currents and choppy waters; aching in their arms and shoulders, the rhythm was all that they knew, ceaseless. Despite the pain they paddled on, even when aided by their makeshift sails, to stay warm in the icy, damp wind. They spoke little, took turns to lead, Edward, Compton-Hill and Wilkinson in one kayak, Andreev and Nordahl in the other with the bulk of the provisions and two dead dogs. They rested on any floe large enough to offer sanctuary, sometimes pitching camp on a rough circle of no more than twenty feet across, which might at any moment split beneath them; but they must sleep. They did not speak of Freely’s fate.

  Once, they woke to find the current had carried them many miles back upon their own path, dragged to the east and, which was worse, to the north they had turned their backs on, as if the Pole’s magnet was taunting them now. Although there was no landmark, no land, to be certain how far, their readings showed that the last two days’ efforts at least had been wasted. Nordahl threw his oar so hard against the floe that it stuck fast; for a long minute there was no sound but the ragged trapped rush of his breathing. Edward stepped forward, gripped the post, and with surprising strength yanked it from the ice and handed it wordlessly to the shaking Norwegian.

  ‘I am sorry, Captain. That was foolish.’

  ‘To your place, Lars. We must row.’

  With every stroke he could feel their anger, lending them at least new vigour against a powerful wind from the south, which drove the ice across the surface with alarming speed so that the closer floes crashed together and they had to weave a perilous route to avoid being crushed between them. The great chunks of it were like clouds scudding over a blue sky. But the sky itself was cloudless, filled with a heavy pale fog, obscuring the sun and spreading a painful wash of light.

  As they drew slowly south, they came to realize that they were no longer alone in the water. Long dark forms could be seen moving with enviable grace and speed beneath them; from time to time, a sleek seal’s head broke the surface. Edward took a shot at a fat female basking on a floe, and they lived off her much-needed blubber and flesh for four days, a welcome and delicious reprieve after two weeks of insipid bouillon and ship’s biscuits. (Edward’s diary makes a careful account of their depleted rations; again, the dogs’ bodies are omitted from the account.) Their clothes and exposed skin were saturated lead-grey, their hands inside the gloves on the oars slippery with the seal oil that provided vital fuel for a fire to cook the animal’s own meat in. ‘I could not touch you now, Emily, and leave your gold skin smeared with filth. How I long to; but even if you were by some miracle beside me, I could not.’

  Emily, who dreamed nightly of her husband’s face frostbitten black, pulling back from his bones and rotting, would have gladly taken his poor, chapped, oil-slick, living hands upon her. She had no reason to despair yet. The date of his expected return grew closer, and her days were filled with speculation about the married life she had been waiting for, which would so soon begin. What would she wear to meet him? What words would he have to greet her? Where would they live, how wo
uld she fit their home, who would they receive there, what would their sons become? Would he lay his hands on her rounded belly and tell his child tales of the sea as it swam in her salt-water womb? He would lay his hands upon her… She lay down each night and longed for this, and almost felt his touch as sleep came — and such was the meagre portion of bliss meted out to her, this moment when her hands became his as she tipped between waking and sleep, before the dream came to turn them black. And in the mornings, the different bliss of very brief oblivion, of waking to the fragrant morning and knowing nothing before the day encroached, bringing the awareness of his absence; and the next thing she remembered was the imminence of his return, which was all she had to fill the empty space beside her and the hours to come before bedtime.

  With a clear sky above them, they gazed out over a stretch of rippling water one morning, or afternoon, or it might have been the dead of night — resting for a spell while the sun was warm and the wind carried them gently forward. Edward felt a strange calm upon him, and thought of the round pond in the park at home, of his little boat sailing beside John’s, one impossibly distant and tranquil evening when they were boys, watching the two white sails bright in the soft yellow light of September…

  ‘It cannot be far now, Captain,’ called Nordahl. ‘We will soon sight land.’

  Edward heard something shift and snuffle on the floor of the kayak behind him.

  ‘Is that true?’ asked a piteous voice. The diplomat’s son had been growing quieter since they’d set out on the water, humming to himself with vacant eyes, and Edward regretted the bullying he’d met at their hands almost as much as he regretted bringing the boy along at all.

  ‘If our readings are true, we should be nearing Franz Josef Land, Hugh. I expect to come in sight of Prince Rudolf Island any day now.’

  In fact, Edward had expected to land at Cape Fligely, on the island’s north shore, some days since. This had always been his intended route, to proceed from there by land and sea through the islands to Jackson’s camp at Cape Flora, where they would be collected — although he had expected the outward journey to be faster and, of course, successful. But even when he turned back, even in his misery he hadn’t despaired of finding the way. Now he knew that their battered equipment or his own calculations must be doubted, that their bearings were wrong; he could not know when the fault occurred (and he could not allow himself to think now, when their survival depended on withstanding despair, of the implications — that their northernmost reading might well be a nonsense, an unknown which could never be confirmed or recovered). He could only hope that the reckoning he’d made to adjust their course would not put them so far out that they bypassed the archipelago altogether. He knew that they could not endure the expanse of open sea they would then have to cross to reach Spitzbergen. There was a limit to the number of lazy, bloated seals likely to drift across their path for the taking. And he had heard, last night, the monstrous blowing of a walrus bursting through the surface not far off; if he could shoot one they would be lucky, but if threatened they were unlikely to survive an attack. These were dangerous waters. He could betray no desperation, confiding only to his diary, and to Emily, the hope that they would come to land west of the British Channel, which split Franz Josef Land through the middle, if they did not sight the northern group soon. ‘Forgive me, there is no more I can do,’ he confesses, ‘but lie to them, and pray alone to the current and the winds.’

  ‘I will keep a look-out, Captain,’ whispered Hugh.

  ‘I cannot deny that his eyes, looking out, were huge and wide,’ writes Edward; ‘but they would just as soon close again.’

  The boy seemed to manage barely an hour of paddling when they set out each day before his head began to nod and he settled back, a beatific peace fixed on his tender face. Edward could not bring himself to rouse him; his weak strokes barely stirred the water anyway, and his always slight frame had grown so sparse in the last weeks that they could as well have carried a broken sparrow in the well of the small craft. He pecked at the crumbs he was portioned; when Nordahl growled that the rest were hungry if he wasn’t, and would take what he couldn’t manage, Edward shared his frustration but said only, ‘Eat, Hugh.’ And Hugh chewed dutifully with a wan smile before curling up like an exhausted child. Yet he was always the first to wake, and would be restored by the time they set out again, his youth shining like some new Apollo beneath the grime that matted his blond curls black.

  Another week passed with still no sight of land; the precarious nights on the floes were taking their toll, and each man, exhausted by anxiety, wondered privately how long they could go on. Edward pushed forward, having no option, dark blood tunnelling his vision to a tiny spyhole focused on the prow of the craft and any obstacle it might encounter. He did not know how many hours they had rowed for, how long it was since they had rested. Very far away, a man’s voice said his name.

  ‘Edward.’ It was insistent, almost certainly real, a man calling him by his first name. Deeper and older than Samuel’s fine tenor; Samuel, he reminded himself, was dead. The friend he’d sailed with on his first voyage and his last. It was not Samuel that said his name, because Samuel’s voice was brighter, and besides, he was dead. Someone was saying his name.

  ‘Edward. The ice. Look.’ It was David Wilkinson. Edward’s vision and mind at last opened out, letting in the light and becoming aware again of the constant ache he had become.

  ‘Is it blood?’ the doctor was asking.

  Blood. The colour of the ice restored the word’s meaning to him. The ice all about them was stained, in patches, a bright russet, as if some massacre had been committed there, arteries slit, his nightmares splashed all over the whiteness. Edward was glad that the doctor had pointed to it, so that he did not have to believe his own eyes. He glanced behind him — Compton-Hill was safely sleeping.

  ‘It looks like blood, Doctor. But you’re the expert on that account.’ How natural and measured his own voice sounded.

  ‘Let’s draw closer.’

  They edged the kayak alongside a floe. He could hear Nordahl calling behind them. He pulled off one foul, stiffened glove with some difficulty, stretched out a hand and touched the surface. The red patches were raised and rough, and came off on his fingers. To the doctor’s alarm, Edward brought his hand to his mouth and put his tongue out to it, a bizarre pink protrusion from the black mask of his face.

  ‘Edward?’

  Edward struggled to master himself, feeling foolish tears rising.

  ‘It’s lichen. It grows here in the summer. We can eat it. And it means we’re near land.’

  ‘Captain!’ called Nordahl, breathless, drawing close.

  ‘I know, Lars. We’ll stop and gather some.’

  Edward knew the stuff could sicken them, but it was edible nonetheless, and he would take his chances. They paused for an hour to take their fill, and moved off with their shrunken bellies stretched by this paltry feast, and the strength of renewed hope. He was sure, this time, he heard a bird’s cry on the wind.

  Within a day their hope was rewarded, and almost thwarted again. A ridge of black basalt burst from the ocean to the south-east, its contours so sharp in the clear air that it could not be a vision. The water roiled around its base as if it had only moments before been raised from the seabed by some wizard, wicked or kind; its crags and columns resembled nothing so much as a long, turreted and forbidding rampart. A tattered cheer went up from the kayaks; Hugh, clutching at Edward’s sleeve, was whispering, ‘A castle, Captain, do you see it?’

  ‘We’ll reach it in a few hours, Hugh, at this rate!’ exclaimed the doctor; Edward kept silent. The air was too clear to judge distance; he knew it was twice as far off as it seemed, a deception of the cruel light. And he could see no way to breach those walls. As they drew close they were at risk of being wrecked against them. And again, he kept his despair to himself, but while they rallied and devised a route he took the time to record the moment: ‘We are in sight of land; I
have been unable to identify the shape of the coast from this vantage, and cannot tell what land it is we are nearing, if indeed it is known. I hope we may rest if we reach it.’

  Land

  Two days pass before the next entry; it is a stoical Edward that next sets pen to paper, a man who has learned through hard lessons to be glad of small comforts. So he begins:

  I am eating an omelette. Sitting on solid ground, with even a little green about me; I am almost dry, in the sunshine, and eating an omelette and sipping tea, and wondering when I shall be brought my morning paper. The tea is tar-black with nothing to sweeten it, of course, and the eggs are eiders’, fried in seal oil, but I am not ungrateful nor ever shall be again.

  Fighting the currents that would have smashed the kayaks against the very island they were striving to land on, they had spent long gruelling hours seeking refuge; the ice packed thicker close to the land and it, too, could easily destroy them. The crash of the waves could not quite drown out Hugh’s constant, useless whimper, so that Edward was sorely tempted to tip the boy over the side, knowing his crime would not be condemned in this company, and forever go unpunished. He told himself later he couldn’t bring himself to do it; although perhaps in truth he simply couldn’t risk upsetting the craft and taking the others down with him. In either case they somehow ignored him and pushed on, shouting across to the other boat through the squall, drenched and exhausted, until at last Edward sighted a low outcrop in the lee of a short promontory, which he thought they might reach with the Devil’s luck — ‘and we are all black as devils after all’. They brought the kayaks round and tacked slowly, painfully, into the foaming current that streamed from the sharp tip of the jutting rock, until they pushed through it into the relative calm of the tiny bay and reached the miraculous shore, a ledge barely five feet wide and four up. Nordahl heaved himself out as they came alongside; Andreev secured ropes to the kayak, tossed them up, and clambered onto the rocks, and together they lifted the craft from the water, cracking the beams horribly as they drew it up and knowing they would struggle to make her seaworthy again. Then they helped Edward, Wilkinson and Compton-Hill through the same process; Hugh refused to stand up in the unstable craft and had to be dragged by both wrists up the rock face (‘squealing as he skinned his knees’, Edward notes unkindly, all patience and pretence gone). As they hauled at the second kayak, they felt the damp wind that had been threatening pick up. All at once, it seemed, the sky and the water darkened, swirling suddenly below them, dizzying; a rope snapped and the kayak crashed back into the sea, shattering as it fell.