He held Waldo’s elbow as Waldo sat again at his desk. ‘This is painful, I know.’
‘What are you expecting to hear, Alec?’ Waldo muttered. ‘What are you expecting?’
‘Well,’ said Alec. ‘Well … you know, Waldo. I … I saw the two of you once.’
‘Oh Holy Jesus!’ said Waldo.
Alec took Waldo’s wrist as if to soothe his pulse. ‘Come now,’ he murmured. ‘Come now.’ And, after a pause, ‘Lady Stewart and yourself. You had a liaison.’ I never understood why he should say it with me there, or even why I was there at all. Was it for some therapeutic reason, or was he honouring the committee of which I was a limp and dazed limb? Any pernicious reason is out of the question. He always consciously forbade himself to act for pernicious reasons.
‘I know that because of the Stewarts’ cook. She’s an Irish woman called Miss Maggie Tierney and she must be close on seventy years of age. She knew, I don’t understand how.’
‘I don’t understand how,’ Waldo repeated. ‘Lady Stewart would never meet me anywhere at all public. She never came to my place in case my neighbours noticed her, in case my manservant noticed. She used to tell me, don’t worry about Maggie, she doesn’t know about physical passion.’
Alec said, ‘Miss Tierney came to see me while I was staying at the Cadogan Arms. She wanted me to speak to Sir Eugene or to Lady Stewart herself. Since it’s confession time, I don’t mind confessing that I’ve always been awed by Lady Stewart and I certainly didn’t want to distress Sir Eugene, who was fund-raising up and down the country.
‘She used to say to me,’ Waldo reminisced, ‘that I was an innocent particle. Thrown this way and that by some electric tension between herself and Sir Eugene and the continent of Antarctica.’
‘It’s a way of looking at the situation,’ said Alec, coughing. ‘But of course it begs the question. In any case, the next time I visited Sir Eugene at his place …’
‘Oakley Gardens,’ said Waldo, uttering the address with nostalgia as well as abhorrence.
‘… I went down to the kitchen and asked Miss Tierney if it was still necessary to talk to either of the Stewarts. She said no, the phase had passed.’
‘I … met with her five times. I entered and left by the mews and no one saw me that I knew of. Yet you’ve known, Alec. All this time.’
Alec tried to de-charge the memory, to rid it of its Oedipal reverberations. He didn’t want Waldo to display his symptoms again. ‘It’s always the way,’ he said. ‘I had an uncle who visited a mistress three times a week for thirty years yet no one knew till his will was read. It’s we occasional sinners who have all the bad luck.’
I admired Alec for the use of that personal pronoun, for the decency of listing himself in the brotherhood of adulterers to which Waldo and I belonged. Here was a man who had loved one woman only, who saw the imminence of God in the aurora, a compulsive father to all other men. When his private journal was published in 1958 it was a song of passion for his wife, of mystical sexuality, a statement of wholeness. It did not sell well in that soulless decade, but it proved to my satisfaction that he had never had to lie to reception clerks or creep past resident cooks.
‘It began,’ Waldo said, ‘at my insistence. It was broken off against my insistence.’
Alec nodded, accepting this statement as a gallantry. There was a silence, during which my mind progressed as far as an image of Victor’s Mr Dawe working on the Irish housekeeper. No doubt Alec considered questions of more point.
Waldo was recovering nicely from the brief discomfort of having to talk about sleeping with Lady Stewart. He had stood up again and even, like a busy man temporarily distracted, moved a meteorology log from the centre of the desk to a more suitable place to his left. ‘I spoke to Sir Eugene after lunch today.’
‘You spoke to him?’
‘I told him …’
Alec covered his mouth with his hand. It was his turn to be pallid. ‘Waldo, were you trying to kill him?’
But Waldo couldn’t admit this. Confessing had done him so much good. He couldn’t believe it hadn’t done Sir Eugene good also. ‘No. I was … I suppose I was … trying to do right by the two of us.’
‘Yourself and Lady Stewart?’
‘Myself and Sir Eugene,’ he said, shaking his head, cancelling Lady Stewart. I wondered how she could have wanted this child. I suppose I was also asking why, if she wanted a child, she didn’t choose me that night at Brenton’s.
Waldo coughed sharply. ‘I was rather low after yesterday’s fit. I’m not supposed to have them. It’s inappropriate. It’s inconvenient for others. I haven’t had any since I was thirteen. I had no idea they would recur. As for Sir Eugene, he ought to know, he’ll be happier for knowing. I realize he can’t speak to Lady Stewart for fifteen months yet, perhaps eighteen. Perhaps that’s a good thing. In any case, I couldn’t go on meeting him every day, and not telling him.’
The next words spoken were the kind that surfaced in some of the psychiatric melodramas I designed in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s. It shows you that one generation’s solemnities become the melodrama of the succeeding generation and the comedy of the next.
‘You saw the fits,’ Alec suggested, ‘as arising from a sense of culpability? Of culpability unconfessed?’
‘Oh yes,’ admitted Waldo. ‘Oh yes, there’s no doubt.’
He began to tell us how they had started in the first place. He was ten years old and his parents had taken him and his brother and sister to the coast of Dorset, in the area of Portland Bill. There is a sort of cratered bay there, almost a lake, but the sea entered it through a narrow mouth. Waldo and his tough twelve-year-old brother Simon had hiked to this strange bay, called Devil’s Hole, and hired a rowing-boat. As schoolboys will, they tossed a coin to see who would take the boat out first. Waldo was allowed to toss and catch the coin but when he had it in his hand he did something that was contrary to their code, something he had nonetheless been trying to do whenever he tossed but which his brother always spotted. He turned the coin over twice instead of the prescribed once. His brother did not notice this time, and Waldo won the first half-hour in the boat. His brother waited on the shingle for his turn. After the agreed period, Waldo brought the boat in. He was not as comfortable as he pretended because there was a surf running, as there often was in Devil’s Hole. Waldo was happy to be on the wet shingle again and to hold the bucking rowing-boat as Simon climbed in. A thunder cloud covered the sun, the surf got imperceptibly higher. After the boat capsized Simon should have been able to swim ashore, but locals, who always know these things but don’t say them until after the event, said that some sort of circular rip occasionally set up in the Hole, that it was futile swimming against it as Simon probably tried to do. Yes, the rip would have taken him out through the gap. Waldo’s fits began soon after, and he knew why … if he hadn’t broken the code by turning the coin twice, he would have had the second turn and the rip would have taken him, not Simon.
At thirteen he got the idea that the fits would cease if he confessed to any authority. He told the school doctor, who went to the trouble of getting the popular school chaplain to inform Waldo on the Deity’s behalf that Waldo was not culpable for a silly thing like the turn of a coin.
It was ridiculous, said Waldo now, a man of twenty-six … but he was following the same cure as he followed when he was thirteen. Without blinking, he asked us to believe he had considered suicide, but that would have left the expedition without a meteorologist.
We were understandably silent for a good ten seconds after Waldo had finished his recital. Alec spoke first.
‘After you told him … how was he?’
Waldo flinched. ‘He said of course he was devastated. He was very honest with me. He said that for the moment he didn’t quite know how he could go on managing the expedition. But he suspected that in a little while he would have found a place in his system for what I’d told him, it would become mere baggage.’
‘Which it
never really can be, Waldo. Can it?’
I remembered Sir Eugene’s confrontation with Barry that afternoon, the lack of his normal primacy, and Barry’s uneasy belligerence.
‘He thanked me,’ said Waldo, ‘for my honesty. That’s too kind of him. But I believed his ignorance would have … Would have affected the whole enterprise.’
We thought about this, and reached our separate conclusions but did not voice them.
‘I have a favour to ask you,’ Alec told Waldo. ‘I would like you to pass the word around. That the journal has been found. That Sir Eugene and I have it.’
It wasn’t I who was being asked, but I couldn’t help objecting. ‘Pass the word around?’ I said.
Alec did not seem to hear me.
‘I would like you to do that, Waldo.’
‘It will bring people to us,’ Alec told me in explanation as we re-entered the main part of the hut. AB Stigworth was serving sherry around the room, a ritual of gentility that always went strangely wrong, since most of the men had nowhere to drink it but sitting on and standing round their bunks. ‘Men will come to us and ask us what Victor knew about them. We can interview them without summoning them, without our having to admit that Victor’s death was an inflicted one.’
We stood in front of the Leader’s alcove. The curtain was drawn but we could hear him speaking evenly. ‘Of course,’ he was saying, ‘if you don’t care for my reasonable instructions you can always move down the coast to Holbrooke’s hut. It doesn’t have the comforts, but if your independence is so important to you …’
I heard a mutter of words. It sounded like Barry.
‘Very well, Mr Fields,’ I heard Sir Eugene say. ‘If you see Stigworth, will you please tell him to put my sherry beside my place at table.’
The curtain opened. Barry came through, saw us, grinned awkwardly. From his desk, Sir Eugene also saw us.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. It was clear he had made a quick recovery.
We went in and Alec put the journal on the desk. ‘That is the rumoured journal Victor kept.’
‘Rumoured?’
‘Some of us had heard a rumour. You’ll see, Sir Eugene, that Victor knew things very prejudicial to Anthony Piers and myself.’
Sir Eugene looked at us. I can remember blushing and hating myself for it.
He turned the pages. ‘Victor was morally defective,’ said Alec. ‘All news was news as far as Victor was concerned.’
After studying the journal for three minutes Sir Eugene looked at us again.
‘There are two conspicuous omissions. They seem to have been ripped out.’
‘They were already missing when Anthony found the journal on the bookshelves.’
‘I suppose,’ Sir Eugene said, ‘someone was trying to be sensitive towards Dr Warwick or me. Or to both of us.’
It was said off-hand. He was admitting no connection with Waldo Warwick.
It was to me they came, knowing I was involved yet sensing I had none of the true committee-of-judges stature which Alec and Sir Eugene (if enjoy is the word) enjoyed.
Par-axel’s was a typical approach. He leaned over me as I finished my meal. He was wary, he was at the one time apologetic and angry. Seeing him and others like this, stooped as if the one public shame of their lives were now a physical drag on their shoulders, I felt some of that hatred of Victor that must have gone into his strangulation.
This was an age when people liked to seem infallible as popes. No one frets about their reputation now as men like Par-axel did then: pure shame could kill men then the way getting caught and being made to pay can very nearly kill men now. Therefore the contrast between Par-axel’s anxiety and his tortured English was pitiable that day.
‘I hear,’ he said in a highly audible whisper, ‘you find a little book of nasty pages belongs to Victor? Is it so?’
‘Yes, Par-axel.’
‘Sir Eugene has it?’
‘Yes.’
‘He is going to keep it?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’
‘What does it say of me?’
‘I saw only what it said of me. That was bad enough.’
‘Oh.’ He laughed a second. ‘Women?’
‘More or less.’
He began frowning. The hint of illicit love hadn’t distracted him for long. ‘Whatever Victor said of me, truth or falsities, I want each everyone of the pages for burning.’
‘Of course. We should tell Sir Eugene that.’
Together we went to Sir Eugene’s alcove. Though we were two apparent petitioners, I was in fact the decoy, leading Par-axel in.
Alec and Sir Eugene were both working at Sir Eugene’s desk, as they often did in the evening. I rapped on the bookcase and they looked up.
‘Par-axel wants to speak to you, Sir Eugene.’
‘On the book belonging with Victor,’ Par-axel amplified in his stage whisper.
So the curtain was closed and we sat, Par-axel and myself, on Sir Eugene’s bed.
Sir Eugene lifted the Journalist’s Yearbook 1909 and dropped it back on his desk. ‘It contains some awkward information about all of us.’
‘My share of awkward information,’ Par-axel began. ‘Does it say Beck loses six men in the mountains?’
Sir Eugene opened the journal to Beck’s place and read a little of what was written there.
‘Beyond the Lapp Gateway,’ he muttered aloud. ‘The Kjölen Mountains in Norbotten. The iron-ore railway. Does that sound right, Par-axel?’
Par-axel’s face contorted, as if in preparation for tears. ‘Sufficient is sufficient,’ he said. It was a saying he had. It meant, why can’t people leave things alone?
‘You don’t have to explain, Par-axel.’
‘But did you know about, Sir Eugene?’ Beck wanted to know. ‘Did you know about?’
He worried for his expeditionary reputation, worried that Sir Eugene would now think him unfit to inhabit the Antarctic.
‘I’d heard something, Par-axel,’ said Stewart. ‘You don’t have to explain …’
But Par-axel could not be prevented from explaining. For the second time that day I found myself listening to a story about responsibility and guilt. Of the iron-ore railway from the Swedish Arctic town of Kiruna through the wilderness of Kjölen Mountains that gave on to the long fjords running down to Narvik, the iron-ore port in the infant state of Norway. In the early spring of 1908 a dozen avalanches obliterated the line on the Swedish side of the border and overturned and buried an ore train. The Swedes reopened the line for the summer, but wanted to survey another and safer route for the railbed. Par-axel, commissioned only a year but accustomed from boyhood to the mountains beyond the Lapp Gateway near Sweden’s North-West border, was serving with one of the two companies of mountain troops garrisoned in Kiruna. He didn’t like Kiruna, he said, telling us why briefly. His views on small-town life in Scandinavia were similar to those of Ibsen and Strindberg which would later become commonplaces with theatre-goers. Kiruna’s melancholy was even more stifling because, being one hundred miles north of the circle, it suffered nearly two months of total dark. And the mountains beyond, said Par-axel, were like God’s teeth.
Par-axel liked it best when he was on patrols or guiding survey teams in the mountains. He was in the mountains of Norbotten province during the first week of September. He had a section of soldiers with him and was guiding a squad of railroad surveyors. Some of the soldiers and surveyors got sick, a high fever. Beck and the others believed it was something they had picked up in the muskeg swamps between Kiruna and the Lapp Gateway. One morning, said Par-axel, he had an argument with the head of the survey team. They had five men sick. They should all, said Beck, stay in camp and nurse them, and rest, and watch for the outbreak of the symptoms in themselves. The head of the survey team, a man in his fifties, refused to obey a subaltern and said it was urgent that the survey team complete a certain series of triangulations in a nearby pass. Beck, himself unwell, sent his sergeant and another so
ldier to guide the four surveyors on a short excursion.
In the afternoon, a furious September blizzard rolled in from the west. Beck did not worry too much about the surveyors and his two men, for they were all sensible, had some food with them, and two flimsy tents adequate in such emergencies for three men each.
When the blizzard ended on the second morning, Beck ski-ed out to meet them, but they did not come back, and only two bodies were found. Against all their training and mountain experience, they had behaved like novices. They had not pitched the tents because the tents were found in the private’s backpack. They had tried to get back to base camp and had lost touch with each other, calling uselessly in competition with the wind. The court of enquiry, Par-axel said, found their blizzard madness inexplicable.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘now, Par-axel cannot show you he is not the Holbrooke kind of creature.’ He meant, not as negligent, not as stupid, not as culpable. Today a computer would assess Par-axel under all these headings, but Par-axel-on-Cape-Frye could not hope for electronic exoneration.
As a reply, Sir Eugene tore out the Beck pages and handed them to him. ‘Burn them, Mr Beck,’ he said.
I foresaw a time when there would be nothing but covers left to Victor’s book of scandals.
For a second, Par-axel inspected the pages. ‘Ashes, they aren’t enough,’ he said, a perfect sentence. ‘No. Ashes never the end for any trouble.’
But he nodded and went, leaving me with Alec and the Leader.
Sir Eugene said, ‘Well, is it him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘No. It can’t be.’
‘Can’t it?’ Alec asked me. He seemed melancholic, a painful convert to the idea that the assassin was within the hut society. ‘I think of how the journal got on its bookshelf. I think of the likelihoods. Both depressing. A man who thinks he is shameful takes it from Victor’s belongings and finds by reading it that we are all more or less shameful. You see, to put the journal on the shelf might be an act of pathetic despair. And the other likelihood is less comforting still. That an assassin put it there. In which case the despair is even more pitiable.’
A Victim of the Aurora Page 12