A Victim of the Aurora

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Forbes-Chalmers?’ asked Sir Eugene. ‘You were devoted to the Forbes-Chalmers hypothesis last night.’

  Alec put a limp hand on the desk, closed his eyes and spoke in a still voice. ‘I wish it were still tenable,’ he said.

  Against his crisp analysis, the theories of Barry Fields and Walter O’Reilly – positing a plum-pudding fiend who enters a pantry from which there is no simple exit, yet does not raid the ice cave farther up the hill where frozen carcases are kept – seemed like village gossip.

  Sir Eugene tore out Alec’s share of Victor’s journal and gave it to him. Then he tore out mine for me. The lights went out. ‘Is it eleven?’ I asked in the dark.

  We said our good nights and Alec stumbled off to find a candle to light him to the latrines and to bed. I had farther to travel and was further delayed by the small accident of ramming my shoulder against the bookcase.

  ‘Anthony,’ said Sir Eugene.

  It was not totally dark. The storm lantern for the use of night watchmen was lit and threw some small indirect light into the alcove.

  ‘Anthony,’ said Sir Eugene, ‘the … er … the liaison between yourself and the … the lady. The … the liaison of which Victor writes …’

  ‘Yes, Sir Eugene?’ I was alarmed. There was no air of Socratic elucidation about the way his shoulders hunched, about the uncertainty of his diction.

  ‘You mustn’t think it indelicate of me, but …’ He chuckled, doing his best to show he didn’t blame me. ‘You know, when I was your age, pretty older women never approached me …’

  I’m afraid, Sir Eugene, the approaching was all from my side,’ I said, deliberately defending Anthea, and though he did not know it, Lady Stewart.

  ‘Of course, of course, it happens. More than we think. The younger man, the older woman. I think of the husband though.’

  My face was burning in the dark. ‘So do I, Sir Eugene,’ I managed to confess.

  ‘I’m not trying to cause you discomfort,’ he said, increasing my profound unease. ‘My experience of these matters is not as extensive, for example, as my experience of the navy.’ He waited. I heard his lips squeak as if he were bunching his face, one eye closed, the other focused on the comparative and unequal bulk of the two sets of knowledge. Knowledge of women. Knowledge of ships and the society of sailors. I stood in the dark, promising myself he would not ask me about the inner life of an adultery. No man could be so transparent, so much like a hurt child.

  He asked me! He said, ‘Tell me? … The lovers … do they … mention the husband? Do you perhaps tend to … to mock him?’

  I wondered if I could end the conversation by mockery. By asking, you want to know what Waldo and your wife said about you while they lay together? I also considered shaking him. Telling him, you’re 43 and a great captain. You shouldn’t ask a boy these questions. Did he believe a woman of his wife’s stature or Anthea’s would compare bodies or mannerisms?

  My answer was out of my lips before I knew I had spoken. ‘I believe, Sir Eugene, that most decent women can make mistakes. But they would consider the sort of thing you mention to be the worst infidelity.’

  He said, ‘That’s what my sense and experience tells me. Thank you, Anthony, for allowing me to raise this delicate matter.’

  Rather than grope across the room and search for a stump of candle by my bunk, I borrowed one from Alec. The stables were half-warm and gently lit by the radiance of Warren Mead’s blubber stove. Warren himself was no longer there. The threat of glanders must have passed. The upright ponies snuffled, standing asleep.

  Only one of the latrines was occupied, the farthest of the five. I entered a middle stall, closed the door and fixed the candle on the spike provided. I bared my haunches and sat shivering, welcoming the minor animal warmth left in the seat by a recent occupant. In a week, I thought, I’ll be bedding down in a tent on the weather side of Ross Island. But I could not believe it. It was a surreal proposition to me.

  I coughed. ‘Must be minus 55 outside,’ I said aloud. Trying to achieve some old-fashioned, pre-murder, pre-journal small talk.

  There was a brisk answer from the end stall. ‘At least, Anthony.’

  Quincy.

  ‘What are your plans for tomorrow?’ I asked. Just to make a noise in the near-dark.

  ‘I? … well, Mr Hoosick and I might try some ice trolling.’

  The Mr Hoosick was very strange, and the voice cold and still brisk. I had been half-expecting this – that men could resent my knowledge of them, or of Victor’s version of them. What was his news of Quincy? I knew that the English press loved a ripe parsonical scandal.

  ‘Trolling?’ I said. ‘Again?’

  Quincy coughed. ‘Today’s haul is not quite adequate. Good night, Anthony.’

  I heard him open the cubicle door and go.

  I had a similar experience as I crossed the main room. Troy rushed to my side from his corner bunk. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘the Leader’s told you all about my crimes as a quartermaster. I mean, usually a sailor’s record is the concern of sailors, a fraternal secret. But it seems that you and Alec have been admitted to some kind of all-knowing triumvirate …’

  ‘I … I know very few details,’ I muttered, not very appeasingly. I had in fact seen fragments of John Troy’s story each time I thumbed the journal. A story about a cruiser, HMS Monmouth and the Kipling-esque haven, Port Said. Goods from ship’s stores sold to merchants ashore. A board of enquiry brought together by the cruiser’s captain to hear charges against John Troy and certain petty officers.

  I blinked, recalling the elements of John Troy’s near-tragedy while he lectured me too loudly. Did anyone – Victor, Sir Eugene – bother to record that the court of enquiry led on to the court-martial, fining and reprimand of the captain? Had anyone ever explained to me, Anthony Piers, what it was like for some officers in the navy, the ones whose background was not genteel, who were allowed to quartermaster or to spend their careers in the engine-room, who rarely joined the gentry on the bridge other than by exceptional invitation? ‘And who are available as convenient victims in the event of explosion or alienation of stores?’ he concluded.

  I tried to manage a tone of brotherly sensitivity I had never quite felt for John Troy, ‘Why don’t you speak to Sir Eugene about it? We can talk to each other, you know. All of us can talk to each other. We’re not strangers.’

  ‘That’s open to debate,’ John Troy murmured. ‘I make no apologies about it. I want to go to the Pole. It’s the road up from below-decks. There, I’ve said it. I don’t want Sir Eugene to be talked out of taking John Troy to the Pole.’

  ‘Honest ambition,’ I said, not telling him that for some reason I was repelled by it in him. ‘But you should sleep easy, John. Victor didn’t accuse all of us of lifting a few ship’s cheeses. Some of us are accused of lechery and murder.’

  ‘Does he say it was cheeses …?’

  ‘Good night, John.’

  As I walked away, he became remorseful. ‘Listen, I don’t mean to imply any of it is your fault.’

  By my bunk, I stripped to my thermal underwear and lay back amongst the blankets. But the haranguing wasn’t over. Above me I could hear Paul settling down. ‘This time next week,’ he murmured, ‘we’ll be two nights out towards Cape Crozier.’ The idea, obviously and for the moment, made him exultant.

  ‘It’s going to be cold,’ I said, almost whimpering.

  ‘Of course. But we’ll be out in the open, away from memories of Victor. Away from routine.’

  I could understand that: that the hut had suddenly become claustrophobic.

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re over the disappointment? About the Pole party, I mean?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course it was my eyes. You can’t take a chap whose glasses ice up. You can’t take him all the way to the Pole.’

  My head found the pillow and I was warmly comatose when another voice, close to me, roused me. ‘Tony.’ I sat up. Isaac Goo
dman.

  ‘Tony, if Victor says the London Zionists put him on a death list, he’s a liar.’

  I sat down early at the main table. Harry Kittery, the night watchman during the period of deeper darkness just passed, had left some of his night work by his empty tea cup. It was a scientific memo to Sir Eugene, of the kind Harry often asked me to read so that I would know and tell others that Sir Eugene did not have him beaten, either as a scientist or a man.

  Dear Sir Eugene, (I read)

  An examination of my notes, sketches and observations of sea ice both in McMurdo Sound and during the voyage south leads me to propose the following series of events in the formation of sea ice. Firstly, I have observed that sea water of normal salt content freezes at about –2°C. Small crystals or platelets of ice, usually square or hexagonal in shape, form just beneath the surface of the water. The Norwegians have called these crystals frazil ice. Their density at this point is still at least 0.985 that of water and so they do not float as buoyantly as ice at its normal density (0.917 that of water). Their density and the nature of the formation of these crystals, I suggest, indicates conclusively that water commences to ice internally and that icing is not initiated by precipitation from the air …’

  I felt again that sense of unsafety that passed through me when Sir Eugene asked me his simple-minded questions about adulterers. How could a great and stable leader push strange and incorrect ideas so stubbornly? I comforted myself by remembering Dr Samuel Johnson’s berserk theory on where swallows went in winter. They flew, said the doctor, in decreasing circles until they coalesced and sank to the bottom of the rivers of Europe where they hibernated in a glutinous ball of feathers.

  Harry returned from washing himself in one of the communal water basins AB Stigworth set about the hut in the mornings. He couldn’t see who it was reading his memo, but got his glasses on and could make me out better. He smiled. He claimed not to be as short-sighted as Paul, but sometimes I wondered.

  ‘This is very well put together,’ I said.

  He grinned again and sat down, a towel over his shoulder. His boyishness diminished my sense of the moment. As I looked at the rest of the paper and saw the stages entitled – grease ice, pancake, new ice, old ice, hummocking, rafting, brash ice, fast ice – I did not suspect that this was the first time a scientist had delineated correctly the stages by which sea ice grows and decays. A short-sighted boy who, as he said, ‘had been to Norway once on an excursion’ and who, for the rest, knew only Derbyshire and Oxford, had been able to do it more exactly than the Norwegians who had lived so long with the reality of ice.

  When I had finished reading, Harry squinted directly at me.

  ‘Does Victor mention my uncle?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had an uncle who was charged with stealing lingerie. Does Victor mention that?’

  ‘Oh no.’ I lowered my eyes from his bright lenses. ‘He didn’t write about you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Your page said Harry Kittery, Physicist, aged twenty-seven years. Little else. He wouldn’t mention uncles, Harry. With most of us he could strike closer to home than that.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Harry murmured. ‘It can only mean I’ve led an awfully dull life.’

  In this newly fallible world, I wondered was this true.

  For even John Troy, in his anger and frankness, had mentioned only one court, and that the lesser in human complexity. He had, in fact, come before two courts. The first, the one about which he had made his protests by candlelight, had been exactly as he said. The captain of HMS Monmouth brought charges against Lt Troy of having misappropriated ship’s stores for the sake of someone ashore. Because John Troy was full of native wit and had good counsel, it was shown that the captain had been guilty of the misappropriations. Admittedly, Lt Troy’s lenient bookkeeping had enabled the captain to draw ship’s stores at will and Lt Troy was asked to be more stringent in future, an urging he had certainly obeyed amongst us in Antarctica. Perhaps, in fact, this was the case which had distressed Troy more. If that were so, it told something of Troy: that his talents were mainly for keeping stores, whatever the navy caste-system had forced on him.

  The second case had involved a court-martial and arose from a charge of assault brought by a young midshipman called Bennett. Victor’s journal made this case into a homosexual triangle drama, a reading which, on the basis of Troy’s behaviour with the maidens of Christchurch, was not very probable. Bennett accused Troy of striking him regularly and using abusive language. Troy said that the only time there had been contact between them was once when they bumped into each other in the corridor. The ship’s surgeon (whom Victor cast as the third point of the triangle) gave evidence that following a passageway collision with Troy, the midshipman Bennett had come to the sick-bay, had said that Troy had attacked him and had displayed a real panic fear that Troy had injured him fatally. That Troy was acquitted was considered by Victor the result of the surgeon’s partisan evidence. That Bennett was put in an asylum within six weeks of the court-martial showed, to Victor’s satisfaction, the limits to which Troy had tormented the boy. And the import of the event was that officers (those genteel officers of whom Troy had complained) would cover up for Caligula if he happened to be a brother officer.

  Victor then contradicted himself by adding a note something like this:

  ‘Anxious that his superiors might believe a naval officer is not normally court-martialled twice unless there is a basis for it in the naval officer, John Troy is twice as busy as any other man. This, he feels, will earn him a place on the polar team, and in the background of a British hero who has been to the Pole, two minor courts-martial pale away to nothing. He is boyishly and innocently unaware that when he is a polar god, he will be twice as vulnerable.’

  Still unsatisfied, Victor ended his entry on John Troy by calling him ‘a mother’s boy’. The image the phrase creates, of a mother pretty if overblown, bosomy, sweet and dominant, was far different from the picture of the wizened and beak-nosed Cornish woman which Troy kept by his bed.

  Yet in spite of Victor’s clear malice against Troy, in spite of my knowing that John Troy did not bastardize other men, I did not feel easy with a man who felt more at risk over lost cheeses than the lost sanity of a hapless midshipman, Bennett by name.

  During the rest of that morning, I became acquainted with the background grievances and histories of half my colleagues, either through meetings with Alec and Sir Eugene or because the men themselves came up to me while I was trying to get on with the auroral paintings.

  In this way I discovered from Isaac Goodman that in 1906, during a rebellion in the Ukraine, Victor had been attached to the staff of General Gorochow, the Tsarist enforcer. His journeys with Gorochow had been what is now called a spin-off from his time with Russian generals during the war with Japan. He had liked Gorochow and described him as ‘the reincarnation of the Cossacks Who harried Napoleon westwards across Europe … etc., etc …’ Elsewhere he wrote of him as ‘a splendid savage, reminiscent of the Tartars.’ Before this phrase appeared in the London press, a number of Jewish families, including Isaac Goodman’s, learned that relatives of theirs had been slaughtered in one of the worst Jew-hunts of Tsarist history, at Krivoi Rog, an ancient merchant city in the Eastern Ukraine. This pogrom had been carried out by troops under the command of the splendid savage. When London Zionists wrote to the editor of the Mail concerning Victor’s blatant admiration for Gorochow’s style, a style that had, for example, removed Isaac’s uncle’s entire family from the earth, Victor replied that he didn’t approve of everything the general had ever done. But the general had always been kind in his personal dealings, said Victor. It was reports of mutiny in the Jewish quarter of Krivoi Rog that had caused the problem, and although Victor did not approve of slaughter on the mere grounds of prejudice, he felt he had to observe that it was often the stubborn unconformity of people that created trouble. Two weeks later Victor told a number of London newspapers that the Lo
ndon Zionists had threatened his life, an accusation he repeated in his journal entry about Isaac.

  ‘A heresy trial,’ said Quincy. He smiled at the cup of tea he held and then raised his eyes to my face. ‘You’d think a heresy trial would distress a clergyman. Perhaps I’m a bad clergyman …’

  It was true that beside the other crimes Victor had listed, Quincy’s scandal had a sunny Edwardian madness to it.

  ‘I am beginning to wonder if the concept of heresy has any meaning in this age. I did not … no, I did not … say so at the trial. I imitated the style of Joan of Arc at her trial. She knew bishops can be as deadly as all solemn men.’

  He was chatting. Pleasant and open. I now found it hard to understand the cause of his gruffness in the latrines the night before. It occurred to me that by speaking to him in the latrines, I might have offended his sense of modesty.

  ‘When I was young and mystical,’ he said, ‘I instituted confession in St Thomas’s, Putney. I had studied the Church Fathers and there seemed no good reason not to introduce the practice on a voluntary basis. My rector didn’t mind, he was one of those sporting parsons and had been opening batsman for Surrey. As long as I didn’t interfere with his rowing and his rugby, I think he would have let me … well, hold Black Masses with the Mothers’ Club.’

  ‘How you would have delighted Victor if you had,’ I mused.

  He told me of armed camps inside the one Anglican church, alignments of which – as an uninstructed though instinctive unbeliever – I knew nothing. At one end were the Evangelicals, who tended to see a Papist under every bed the way an extreme Republican might see a Communist in every liberal. At the other end of the Anglican prismatic colouration were the aesthetic and mystical young men who found some of the rituals of Rome appealing, though the concept of Papal infallibility repelled them.

  The Evangelicals were powerful in Westminster and Southwark and in the end would bully the Parliament of England into instituting a Royal Commission into Papist infiltration of that good and pallid institution, the Church of England. One of the first moves of the Southwark Evangelicals in their attack on Papist infiltration was to arraign the curate of Putney before the bishop’s court on a charge of heresy.