On that pedestrian phrase, he shook hands with Quincy to show that the ceremony was over.
I was standing near Beck and thought it might be time to begin my duties for the committee of three. ‘Par-axel!’ I called.
He stared at me without smiling. I didn’t know whether it was the death or the ban on solo ski-ing that made him look that way.
‘If you need a ski-ing partner …’ I said, just as a way to begin the conversation.
He nodded. ‘Thank you muchly,’ he told me. ‘But Beck is not enjoying the cross-country as he did in the pasts.’
‘Don’t say that.’ I could feel the false smile on my lips. ‘You must see so much on a good cross-country run.’ But I was immediately at a loss to name some of them. ‘Mountains, ice, even some winter seals perhaps. Old Forbes-Chalmers …’
He shook his head. ‘I still am doing the repair jobs on skis.’ It was his continuing complaint, the way we treated our skis. Once he had lectured us. ‘All the time I ask you all to leave each his skis either in the racks in porches or in nature room. You can hang them on rafters in there. How else can I keep tracks of them if you don’t put them each in his same place every time. But I find them anywhere. Under bunks. In stables. Even in latrines find I a pair one damn day.’
Now he shook his head and said to me, ‘If I go, I come and tells you.’
As I turned away I was blushing that my small investigative sally had ended so inanely. I walked back to the hut behind Barry Fields and Peter Sullivan, the cinematographer.
‘It was a strange speech,’ I heard Barry say. ‘I thought the Leader liked poor bloody Victor. I thought he thought Victor was a lovable rogue or something. You know, puckish or something.’
Sullivan’s reddish nose sniffed, his ginger moustache jerked. Once he had made a feature film which Victor and a half-dozen other columnists had mocked. He muttered wistfully into his scarf. ‘There was a day in ’06 when I spent the whole morning thinking I’d go round to his place in Cheyne Walk and beat the bejesus out of him. However … a nice service of Quincy’s. Very fine.’
Barry said, ‘Well, of course. Not that that stuff means anything to me. I’m a bloody socialist.’
Behind them I groaned. Not at Barry’s habitual statement. But because, after the crime, I had the burden of weighing even idle conversations.
On a shelf above Alec Dryden’s bed lay a small mummified seal. Alec had found this dried and incorruptible body some forty miles inland in the Taylor dry valley. He also told us that it was at least two hundred years dead, a little crab-eater who took an inland course, driven by an evolutionary impulse or by some short-circuiting of instinct. Once when he’d had two brandies he toasted the small mummy as either a zoological fool or hero. Its eyes however were glazed and humbled by the decision it had taken one southern autumn in the reign of Queen Anne. In its shrunken face was no quotient of reward for its errant intention to live far from the coast.
I watched it as Alec spoke tactfully to me. ‘I don’t think we should seek each other out,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we should draw attention to the fact … that we’re helping Sir Eugene … that we’re … serving together.’
It seemed to me that we had drawn attention when the curtain was pulled across Sir Eugene’s alcove. But I said nothing. I could not myself understand why, as soon as I entered the hut, I had come to Alec’s corner, to his table covered with pages of handwriting and fine naturalist sketches and zoological works of reference.
‘I was wondering,’ I said, looking about me for an excuse. I picked up a pencil drawing of the organ and blubber areas of an Adelie penguin. ‘I was wondering …’
The blood in my jaws crepitated and smouldered.
‘It’s all right,’ Alec said. ‘It’s shock, you know. Sit here a while.’
As I lolled, nursing my brow, at Dr Dryden’s desk, Norman Coote the tractorman had begun to cross the room towards us, was about to add further definition to the killing.
I am not the first to comment on the decline of murder as a rational exercise. In the first ten years of the century the world and society seemed well ordered and reasonable and murderers, even if acting in passion and on impulse, paid tribute to the rationality of their universe by committing rational murders. The motives themselves were appreciable and rational, having to do with gain or clear sexual goals or freedom from a real, not a paranoid, threat. No one seemed to climb a steeple and, for reasons the sniper himself could not guess at, snipe at people. You would not, on emerging from a barber’s shop say, be shot dead by a stranger for causes neither the shooter nor you would ever fathom. Murder seemed not haphazard but an outlying planet in a clockwork solar system.
We expected therefore that the killing of Victor, even if it were the work of Forbes-Chalmers, partook of the orderliness of the world.
It seemed, when Norman reached Alec’s desk, that he was presenting one of the elements of the order of our grand Edwardian polar murder, or even that the crime, being its own animal, were giving us a glimpse of its pervasive organs by sending Norman to us.
He stood above us. His square dark face was fixed in a frown and there was a hiss of air between his set teeth. He always hissed somewhat.
‘I believe you two gentlemen are more or less Victor’s executors.’
It was the idea he had picked up from last night’s frantic conferences.
‘You have his property in hand,’ he suggested further.
‘That’s true,’ said Alec. He invited the tractorman to sit on the bunk.
When Coote found a place to squat, he asked in his lock-jawed monotone, ‘All his documents?’
Alec lifted a folder. ‘Articles. Letters. Yes.’
‘You must have seen his gutter-press journal then. And in that case you probably know about my £1000 from Cave tractors. But then, I’ve never made a secret of it. Sir Eugene’s aware of it. I don’t want Sir Gavin Cave frightened though. Frightened by any snide comments in the rags.’
We stared at him, comprehending nothing.
‘You must know,’ he stated.
‘No, Norman, we don’t.’ Alec handed him the folder. ‘Look in that, if you want.’
But Norman didn’t want to. He seemed to be moved by broader purposes than simply to safeguard his connection with Cave the tractor-maker. He asked, ‘You remember the day the ship left?’
It had been in mid-February. The McMurdo, not buoyant even when unloaded, wearing sail and putting out steam yet still making slow headway, cruised hooting up the sound. Making for Tasmania which, by an irony, had once been Britain’s farthest convict hell. As I watched McMurdo go, I had a convict hollowness in my bowels. The sound, without that human landscape of forecastle, masts, mesh of rigging, main-deck meathouse and stubby quarterdeck, seemed deathly vacant.
I remember that Sir Eugene, understanding the state of our souls, issued eight bottles of brandy. This meant a quarter-bottle each, enough in most cases to steam out of us our sense of exile.
That clear and sunny evening of late summer, the hut was not quite ready to be occupied and we were camped in tents on the black volcanic scree close by.
Victor and Coote had shared a tent and sat up in their sleeping bags that evening with a stomachful of brandy, chatting. And we all knew how badly Victor held his liquor considering he was a man of the world.
Norman catalysed Victor’s quick tongue by projecting his own success. If the tractors out-hauled man, dog and pony, Sir Gavin Cave would pay him a thousand-pound bonus, and with that amount you could start an engineering works of your own. The pleasure Norman took in this promise of a bonus was child-like and endearing to most of us, and since dragging supplies in man-harness, though excellent for the belly muscles, quickly lost its aura, we hoped yet doubted the tractors would succeed.
I can imagine, though, how Norman’s hopes would have irked Victor. He could tell the boy-mechanic how a true professional makes money on the side! The words in which Norman Coote now reported Victor’s p
roposals had the Henneker flavour to them.
Victor began in the gutter press, said Victor (said Norman and, now, say I). He never lost sight of how much you could earn from that source. He discovered the scandalous associations of many famous people, partly through his contacts in Parliament and the services, partly through the efforts of an enquiry agent who pursued and spied on the famous for him. Albert Dawe was the agent’s name; he kept big offices in Tottenham Court Road. And why not big offices, since Victor could make a few thousand out of a good scandal just by selling it anonymously, and Albert Dawe got 20 per cent and considered himself a literary collaborator?
Because the expedition was bound to become a fabulous enterprise (this was, according to Norman’s memory of a conversation now four months old, Victor’s phrase), he had employed Mr Dawe to look into the lives of the expeditionary officers. It wasn’t an expensive commission, said Victor. Dawe took a day or so to discover of any London resident more than was known by the man’s wife or mother. With country-dwellers like Alec Dryden, it took as much as two days, and since country work was harder and more wide-ranging, he often left the more mechanical London enquiries to his senior staff.
Listening to Norman’s Victor-recital, I began to cough, choking on spittle as I wondered if Albert Dawe’s professional expertise had been applied to the days of cyclical love-making and wine-sipping I had enjoyed with Lady Hurley in Norfolk.
They look like a garden of roses, Victor had said. Our young colleagues, the flowers of youth. (He strove for all the clichés which ten years later would show up on war memorials.) You’d be surprised, he said. He mentioned a few names. Once the expedition was over and we were all hallowed figures, he could sell us singly or by the brace or set to the right editors.
Norman, to his credit, asked Victor how he could consider letting this sort of information out about his colleagues. You don’t understand journalism, said Victor, or the popular mind. It was all very well to give the masses heroes, he said, the masses wanted them. But you’ve got to remember the masses also didn’t want them. They wanted to find out that men as ordinary and squalid as themselves could participate in polar heroism, they wanted to have the heroism rendered normal by reading in the gutter press that in some aspects great men were mean or grasping or lustful. People in authority didn’t believe such stories, but the clerk from Vauxhall who was never going to do anything heroic, he was titillated and enthralled by scandalous stories of heroes and didn’t think any the worse of the individual hero.
‘I asked him,’ Norman told us, ‘if he had some sort of dossier on all of us. He said, not you. But even what I’d said to him – about Sir Gavin and the tractors – that could be made into the right kind of story. Of course,’ he added, ‘it lacks the element of … of adultery and such like.’ He coughed. ‘He mentioned the Leader’s wife,’ he said under his breath.
‘What?’
Norman’s teeth bit tighter still, as if he’d set himself a ventriloquist’s task. ‘He mentioned Lady Stewart. No details. But he mentioned her. She was one of his better assets.’
Playing strenuously with his pipe and all the varied objects on his desk, Alec gave Norman the obvious assurances, asked for his silence, and sent him back to his garage.
I was still innocent enough to think, if Victor made a log of our sins, no one’s would be worse than mine. I didn’t want a search made for any supposed journal.
‘He was teasing Norman,’ I said.
Alec showed me his unconvinced eyes.
‘Norman’s a backward damn mechanic,’ I said, more desperately. ‘As naïve as Victor’s readership. Listen, most of us are men in our twenties. What could he say about us? That once or twice we visited brothels?’ My indelicacy caused a small pained flicker of Alec’s eyebrows. He believed Norman’s story because it had subtleties to it which were beyond Norman’s powers of creation. The arguments (which, Norman said) Victor had used to explain how no one was damaged by a press exposé were exactly the reasons a glib and contradictory man like Victor would have touted.
Alec massaged his forehead gently with the tips of his fingers. It was a mannerism of his, a little rite to ensure a clear brain. ‘I don’t want him to know yet. It could be painful to him.’ He nodded in the direction of Sir Eugene’s temporarily vacant alcove.
I could have said, he doesn’t need to be coddled. He’s forty-three years old and leader of the New British South Polar Expedition. But it didn’t suit my purpose to be peevish.
‘Watch the stove,’ said Alec. ‘Though it’s hard to burn a journal in a stove without half a dozen people knowing. The burning of a journal is quite a winter incident …’
I went back depressed to my auroral painting. But yesterday’s vision was stale today and I didn’t want to spoil the work by putting a distracted brush to it. My mixed paints dried in their little pots and still I had not managed a stroke.
While I sat useless at the easel, the neurotic certainty came to me, rapidly taking my body over in the style of a virus. Quincy and the American were making a hole in the ice. Quincy and the American would, for reasons the virus would not specify, slip the journal through the ice.
Light came from something – from the moon low in the north, from stars, perhaps even a minor radiance from the winter sun above New Zealand. We did not need our lanterns, they lay unlit. Hoosick manned the winch, and Quincy and I lanced ice fragments in the hole we had at last made. If we ceased spiking in the hole new ice would form, thin in one second, impermeable in ten. I was happy however to deal with the stubborn freezing instead of with the persistence of suspicion.
‘All right,’ Hoosick said. The words meant nothing except that he was happier than he ever was in the hut. I suppose he knew what to expect of men, but never knew what biological surprise might come up from under the ice at mid-winter.
He began to winch the net-and-bucket out of the hole. As it came up I saw the flashes of gold in it. In the instant before the water in the bucket froze, he lifted out the fine mesh net and dropped it in a wide-mouthed Thermos flask held and now capped by the parson, Quincy. Some of the splashings shone golden on his gloves, yet winked and went out as the water turned to ice.
‘Diatoms,’ Quincy explained. ‘Copepods. The food that krill live off.’
‘And whales live off krill,’ I suggested.
‘That’s right,’ said the Rev. Quincy. ‘It’s the first time anyone’s dug through the ice to find out if krill might still be there at mid-winter.’ He had so much pride in his brother biologist. I looked at him hopelessly. In which colleague could I safely take pride?
‘Gentlemen,’ Hoosick said, ‘please keep working with the spikes.’
For in a few seconds of idle conversation ice inches deep could form in the hole.
Oh, it was cold out there beneath the afternoon stars. When I left the hut just after 2 p.m., Waldo’s instruments promised a freezing forenoon. –55°, I believe, the alcohol thermometer read. A breeze had come up and put an edge to that.
‘If there are copepods, there are krill,’ said Quincy. ‘And if krill, then perhaps Byram is correct in his surmise. That whales may stay in Antarctic waters in the winter. Not by choice, of course. But through a failure of the navigational or mating instincts.’
I imagined a vast blue mammal nosing under the thick ice, its instincts jangled.
Quincy coughed, set his face, and paused. He had all at once remembered Victor and so did not want to go on explaining krill and whales to a layman. ‘Not this far south of course,’ he said at last. ‘They have to breathe, you see. At least every hour or so.’ He harpooned the ice in the hole. ‘Not this far south. But the presence of the diatoms is, you see, a sort of negative proof …’
I saw tears start from his eyes and freeze on his cheeks. I was awed by someone who could actually weep for Victor.
After he composed himself he said, ‘You know, Byram is a fascinating fellow.’ Byram, five yards away and down-wind, could not hear him. ‘Full of feeli
ngs of damnation. Yet such an appetite for the natural world. Yesterday he was concerned with a minuscule parasite out of a fish’s gut. Now his mind is on some great blue whale lost under the sea ice.’
‘Feelings of damnation?’ I repeated, for that was the phrase that had taken my attention.
‘Well, I mean, hasn’t he ever said to you …?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, I thought he said it to everyone. I’m going to hell, you know. He often says it to me. As often as Barry Fields says he’s a socialist.’
‘Why would he say that?’
‘Because he’s wealthy.’
‘I thought that in America wealth was a sign of salvation.’
‘Not to Byram. Of course when he says hell, he doesn’t mean a conventional hell. He claims to believe in reincarnation. Perhaps he’s afraid he’ll come back as a mean little parasite in a fish’s gut. Whereas he wants to come back as a fin-back whale.’
‘All right,’ Byram called. ‘I’m lowering the apparatus again. This time to ten fathoms.’
I thought of Hoosick’s infamous and frail mother, who herself had sought contact with great mammals. Her apogee had occurred on the day she bribed the King’s chauffeur in St Jean-de-Luz. Oh, the impact of US railroad and stocks money, that it could corrupt a royal chauffeur! The result was that King Edward had a puncture on the road to Biarritz. I suppose a puncture is, like death, a reminder to a King that certain impassive physical laws are at work. Edward stood in the road waiting for another car to appear. When it came and the equerry had flagged it down, it proved to be the vehicle of the American pursuer, Mrs Hoosick. All he needed, Edward said, choking but gallant, was to travel with her back to Biarritz. And so, behind her own tight-lipped chauffeur, she rode through the town, the grandest wintering-place of Europe, with a King at her side.
A Victim of the Aurora Page 9