A Victim of the Aurora

by Thomas Keneally

  Quincy’s rector, the rugby-ing man, on his way out to play tennis at the Hurlingham Club, said, ‘You’re no heretic. You understand the knock-on rule.’ (The knock-on rule is a fumble rule in rugby football.)

  ‘In the end,’ said Quincy, ‘I was not condemned for heresy, but I was reprimanded as a witless tool of Papism and was told not to hear confessions. The strange thing is, I think they were right. I wouldn’t do that now – offer to hear confessions of honest people. It’s arrogant and morbid. I think so, anyhow. In the end, I broke with that bishop and moved to Yorkshire and settled down … settled down to the study of parasites.’ He snorted, a little ashamed despite himself that his old confession-hearing passions had died.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a really succulent outrage to me,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Compared to what some vicars do? No. It isn’t.’ Somewhere he had learned to see all things in proportion. Ecclesiastical bun fights and small creatures from the guts of fish.

  ‘You should have read,’ he told me, ‘the poisonous letters those Evangelicals wrote me. Especially the parsons’ wives. They would have thought better of me if I’d kept a mistress on curate’s pay.’

  I remember Peter Sullivan, perhaps because unlike Troy and Beck and Quincy, he neither spoke to anyone about Victor’s opinion of him, nor did he look as if he would ever ask. He knew what to expect of Henneker and had more experience of press barbarity than most of us. He did his work and neither hated nor forgave the renowned journalist.

  We all knew their disagreement grew from a long moving picture Peter had made two years before. It is very likely that Peter’s film was one of the first dramatic features in the modern mould. It was certainly the most expensive to that date since Peter went to the trouble of hiring some of the most noted West End actors and actresses. The film, when cut and edited, ran 50 minutes, a great length for those days. Its birth as (perhaps) the first of a new genre coincided with the birth of another art form – the film review. Victor’s review in The Sketch was devastating and it, combined with the unprecedented length and the Edwardian artiness of the frame compositions, meant that Peter failed to get a wide distribution for this, the first (as far as I know) art-film.

  The journal worked on these facts from Victor’s angle, including mention of a threatening letter to the critic from the director and Peter’s entanglement with an actress. The lady, however, if Peter’s placid busy-ness around the hut was as authentic as it seemed, did not appear to be on Peter’s mind to the extent Anthea was on mine.

  By lunch-time all we knew was that the journal had bruised us, had even entered and stained our view of the earth, yet had been no help to Sir Eugene, to Alec Dryden, to myself as committee member. We had admitted a measured dose of toxin into the body of the hut and found it unprofitable.

  As for the rest, the Yearbook mocked Barry as a redneck and bumpkin. It damned Hoosick’s abstracted scientific air by detailing Hoosick senior’s career as a stock manipulator and plunderer of railroads. Unprofitably it derided Warren Mead for his pony-love and Harry Webb for his love of dogs. Unprofitably it delineated the strong reasons some of us might have for desiring Victor’s silence, for bringing (as somebody had) his silence about. Even Norman Coote had, as he suspected, his place there. Perhaps, wrote Victor, Norman would poison all the dogs one night to ensure the tractors had no competition. ‘Once I made the mistake,’ wrote Victor, ‘of mentioning that I was unimpressed with tractor-power and intended to write a feature comparing the mechanical uncertainty of machines with the assured spunk and muscle-power of huskies. As I spoke, Norman saw his dream of owning his own modest engineering works fade. He said, why not wait for the spring? No sense jumping to conclusions …’

  These days Victor would have been called a moral defective. He was charming in the way that he gave you the sense that you were the one person in a crooked world whom he respected. And all the time you thought, ‘Is this the dreaded Victor Henneker?’ It was just that he could see no reason not to sell you in the end. Betrayal was his medium and he couldn’t help that. I think, even in those days, we all understood that. There was no communal pulse of anger in the hut. Victor had been Victor, that was all.

  When we were all at the lunch-table that day, Sir Eugene came from his alcove to join us. We saw him stuff the Yearbook through the small gateway of the stove. We saw the lick of flames. None of us smiled.

  I remember Victor had written only one generous thing in the whole damn book.

  Paul Gabriel, naturalist, age 24 years. Myopic. Have recommended Dr Philip Sorel’s eye exercises.

  6

  ‘There,’ said Barry, as if he owned the volcano. We had just crossed the icy hollow three hundred yards from the hut where in summer the Adelie penguins made their rowdy nests. From a small rise cluttered with black rock, the volcano’s Jurassic gift to McMurdo Sound, we could see Mt Erebus luminous in the dark, breathing a luminous smoke. Closer we could see the Barne Glacier running amongst the shallow hills where, by Barry’s reckoning, Forbes-Chalmers lived.

  Barry stood still, dramatically, a man making a vow. ‘Next summer, whenever we can find the time, Beck and me – we’re going to climb it.’

  Six months ago I might have said, let me come too. But today the mountain looked dominant and worshipful and all of its two-and-a-half-mile height. Like the two Siberians, I doubted if summer would ever come and transform the peak.

  Barry ran down a snow-bank, gave a yell and jumped to touch an imaginary point in the air above him. ‘It’s great to be out of that bloody hut,’ he said landing. ‘Forbes-Chalmers, gird your loins.’

  I suppose I was a sombre companion. After a time I said – hardly knowing I was doing so, ‘John Forbes, dead in Christ.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Alec Dryden saw that. On the wall in Holbrooke’s hut.’

  ‘John Forbes, dead in Christ?’

  ‘I believe it was written in charcoal.’

  ‘I’ll be damned.’

  Barry continued briskly over the hummocks towards the glacier.

  My shorter-legged attempt to keep level with him reminded me yet again of the problems I’d be facing within a week. As Barry hiked, he talked compulsively of the stones of Antarctica. The previous summer there had been little time, and he and Isaac, Kittery and PO Wallace had been lucky to manage a journey across the sound to a glacier which Shackleton had named the David a year or two before. Barry’s professional passions, not to mention Isaac’s, had been roused by the evidence they’d found there. Now the geologists awaited a new summer and the chance to move through the country more widely and deeply. ‘We came to this great rock wall at the mouth of the glacier,’ Barry was telling me now. ‘There was Devonian sandstone in the bottom. Four hundred million years old. And above it a great wall of rubble compacted to a single mass by pressure from a glacier, not the David, a glacier older than that, a glacier that moved during Antarctica’s last ice age. And then above this 900-feet-thick layer of rubble there was more recent Permian rock, say 250 million years old. Now – this is the best bit – in the Permian rock, Isaac and me, we found fossils that contained the petrified leaves of Glossopteris. It’s a fern leaf, not unlike the leaf of a gum-tree in general configuration.’

  ‘Amazing,’ I said, though I didn’t yet see the full significance.

  ‘Now, later in the same journey, Isaac examined other Devonian rock just like the Devonian rock at the bottom of the rubble, and found in it fossils of snails and various kinds of lichen. So, you see, Antarctica at one time supported basic life, then it had an ice age, then a period when ferns grew and, maybe, animals wandered.’

  I looked about me. Had the bear and deer and pheasant ever populated this shore? Barry continued, speaking in rapid action, in time with his stride.

  ‘Now Isaac – who’s a really bright bastard, I mean really bright – has been corresponding with this German scientist, Wegener, Alfred Wegener, who touts the theory that all the major continents once belonge
d to one great continent, Pangeia, and that Australia, Antarctica, America, Africa, Asia drifted to their present distances from each other. Wegener’s laughed at by other experts and finds it hard to get his views published. But Isaac believes that what we found on the David last summer backs up the Wegener hypothesis.’

  ‘How dull art is,’ I said with some genuine envy. ‘How dull art is compared to that.’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Barry, ‘I couldn’t paint a barn. But I can’t wait to get out there with my mate Isaac and with some strong bastard like Wallace. One of those glaciers up on the ice-shelf, the Mulock say. Jesus, we’ll give its lower reaches a going-over. A royal going-over!’

  In that moment I pitifully envied Goodman and Fields and their geological obsessions. They had too powerful a sense of purpose to waste their fury on Victor. Theirs to prove Pangeia. Theirs to conjure from Permian rock an Antarctica verdant, sub-tropic, favoured by prehistoric lizards and mammals. No one sacrifices a purpose like that just to punish a journalist.

  Now we were amongst steeper hills. From the top of one I saw the face of the glacier. The Barne itself was riddled with ice holes. But they were too unstable to provide a habitation for man.

  We went uphill another two miles, taking fifty minutes to do it. The higher we got the more noticeably Mt Terror thrust its summit over Erebus’s shoulder. On the egg journey we would travel on the other side of Terror. The improbability of the idea depressed me anew.

  Seeing the garbage heap, I suspected it was a third mountain. People often had depth problems when they looked at objects in Antarctica. Once, up on the ice shelf, Sir Eugene saw a shred of black biscuit paper just beyond the doorway of his tent and mistook it for a dog team miles away. I looked at the garbage heap (it was slightly above my eye level) and saw a mountain, a sister to Erebus and Terror. It had the configuration of a peak, dusted at the top with last night’s small amount of drift on the north side and, seemingly, bare on the south. I did not run to it because one does not run up to mountains. Barry seeing it more truly, ran up to it and began uncovering its details with his gloved hands.

  We would never have seen this midden, short of tripping over it, if it hadn’t been for the half-sled lying on top. One sawn-off half of an old sled, now showing a splintered runner, and with all its bindings loose.

  ‘This is a Holbrooke sled,’ Barry told me. It was an intuitive statement. He was no specialist in comparative sleds. ‘Forbes-Chalmers must have used it to get carcases of seals and penguins up here. Now it’s broken. I wonder what he’ll do?’

  I took hold of a strip of broken binding and tugged it, laughing. It could be no one else’s garbage dump but Forbes-Chalmers’s. I was weeping with elation, and goddam it if the tears didn’t freeze to my cheeks!

  ‘Hey!’ Barry said, taking a clumsy mittened hold of my shoulder. ‘Hey! What’s got you, Tony?’

  I couldn’t tell him, though I knew, I wept because the garbage indicated the threat might be external to the hut, and external threats can, as Eugene had said, be dealt with. I was already believing that the owner of the dump had struck Victor down as insensately as would ice or wind. We dug beneath the half-sled, finding bones and feathers and Swallow and Ariel pudding tins. I sat back in the snow holding one of these, laughing still, reading its tattered label. I felt wonderful and renewed.

  ‘Not so loud, Tony,’ said Barry.

  ‘Why?’ I laughed. ‘Why?’

  ‘His hole must be dose by. Have you thought of that?’

  I stuffed one of the cans inside my windproofs. Through three layers of wool I felt its freezing rim.

  Barry dropped the can he himself was holding. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said. ‘Poor loveless bastard.’

  We searched for two hours. Every near and substantial snow-bank. We placed ourselves so that their contours showed up against the sharp night sky, but saw no smoke. We struck the face of drifts with our boots, hoping to break some artificial barrier that gave on to Forbes-Chalmers’s lobby.

  ‘Will we call to him?’ I asked in the end.

  ‘Call? If he wanted to meet us he could have met us last January.’

  Some obscure memory of childhood shyness made me say, ‘It isn’t the same thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not wanting to meet people yet answering when they call. It isn’t the same thing. In fact,’ I added, my brain lithe again, ‘I think he wants contact.’

  But Barry was beginning to panic. Soon we’d have to turn home. He ran to the top of a snow-bank. ‘If we don’t find him this time, he’ll move his hutch somewhere else.’

  ‘Perhaps he hasn’t seen us. Perhaps he’s away.’

  ‘Away? Away where? He’ll see our boot marks. For God’s sake, Tony, we’ve got to find him this time.’

  We hunted and kicked another forty minutes. At the end of that time I insisted on calling. ‘Why not?’ said Barry. dropping on his haunches. ‘Our tracks … our tracks are a dead give-away anyhow.’

  I called John Forbes. I called Malcolm Chalmers. The sound bounced from the sharp snow to the dry air. If he was listening – if (perhaps) they were listening – the name must have resounded in his (their) brain(s). Must have taken his legs from under him.

  I got no answer. We had to begin the hike downhill.

  ‘Maybe,’ Barry murmured, ‘we should dig a pit. Maybe we should set traps.’

  ‘He’ll show himself,’ I said. I believed it. The dump had been built to tease us. A man who did not somehow want to meet others would build a more discreet tip. I felt some communion with the shy, lonely, homicidal Forbes-Chalmers.

  Barry grew aggressive. As on that night in Christchurch, he did not take frustrations well. ‘Why? Why in the hell would he show himself.’

  ‘It occurs to me,’ I said, ‘that he chooses not to take quarters of New Zealand mutton from the ice cave. That would be easy for him and he would enjoy the meat after all his meals of penguin and Weddell seal. Instead of that, though, he comes in through the porch, walks through the sailors’ quarters if not ours. Any time on the journey to the pantry and back to the porch he could be discovered. Yet he does it. Why?’

  ‘Because he’s got scurvy and most of his teeth are gone. He can manage pudding. He can’t manage meat.’

  I laughed. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Half the struts had been knocked out from beneath my hypothesis but I didn’t care. ‘I thought it might have been this. He wants to move amongst his fellow men. He keeps away when we’re conscious. A shy child keeps away from children he really wants to play with. A shy man won’t speak for years to a girl he wants.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Barry said.

  Everything was changed for me. Even by moonlight, Erebus now looked like a companion. In the space of perhaps a mile’s walk a dazzling blue drapery aurora defined itself over the Victoria Land mountains. I imagined Paul and Alec and myself hauling our light sleds to Cape Crozier beneath such wonders. I could feel the shape of the pudding-can growing blood-warm inside my clothes.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Barry who, untouched by my elation, was still thinking away, ‘I have posited a Forbes-Chalmers who beats Victor up and leaves him there, down by the hut, then finds his way back to his hutch, two miles in a blizzard.’

  I had overlooked this obvious problem, as people in ecstasy do overlook the obvious. I stopped and noticed the cold again. It felt as if it were falling into the –60s. I could feel the air burning as it entered my sinuses. All that was needed now to make us stagger crabwise, wincing, our faces averted northwards, was a fifteen-knot wind. Barry kept strolling and spinning theories.

  ‘No worry,’ he said, ‘no worry. He must have an ice hole down near the beach for emergencies, somewhere down at the mouth of the Barne. In fact, he’d have to. Imagine if he’s out clubbing a Weddell seal and one of those winds comes down off the plateau. We get some kind of warning about these things from Waldo’s instruments. But Forbes-Chalmers gets none at all. He has to have some hole down there. I didn’t find
it yesterday. But then we didn’t find his main residence today. Positing,’ (it was becoming his favourite word) ‘positing a beach hole, let me paint the scene as it happens. He meets Victor in the middle of a blizzard. I mean, the middle of the blizzard is no tough time of rendezvous to a man who’s lived here alone for four years. And Victor’s one of those crazy journalists who would love to be able to tell the world how he interviewed an Antarctic castaway in the middle of a bloody storm. Real Stanley and bloody Livingstone stuff. Forbes-Chalmers does Victor all that damage – the damage you say was all frost-bite but Sweep Stigworth thought was genuine bottled-in-bond punishment. Forbes-Chalmers crawls back to his coastal hole. He doesn’t even hear our search parties. And when the blizzard starts to die early the next morning, he traipses back to his main residence before we’ve finished breakfast.’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him. Regenerated. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Otherwise,’ he pursued. ‘Otherwise … do you think loneliness could endow man with a strong directional instinct? Like a whale’s?’

  7

  Half the things the members of the British South Polar Expedition learned in Antarctica they learned at table. Now they had discovered from Sir Eugene, over dinner, that it seemed Forbes-Chalmers was not a chimera. The sailors, who had eaten a little earlier, had been asked in so that they could hear too. I saw the Russians smiling at each other. Though they barely understood the speech, they knew it was all benign talk. They trusted God and Eugene Stewart to bring the sun back.

  ‘So, Lieutenant Troy,’ Sir Eugene said, turning towards Troy’s place at table, ‘your six puddings are accounted for.’

  There was a stutter of pointed laughter from the sailors, who had to work with Troy and suffer the sharper edge of his fear that stores would go missing by the gross and he would again be blamed.