A Victim of the Aurora

by Thomas Keneally

  And Alec went on enumerating further burdens – medical kits, ropes, clothing, boots, barometers and wind gauges, a padded crate for the eggs – minor objects which yet added their discreet poundage to the load.

  Altogether our burden would be seven hundred pounds on the two sleds. Some of that we would leave at the depôt placed fifteen miles east of Pram Point, and the weight would go on diminishing as we ate the supplies and after we had left Waldo’s equipment at Cape Crozier. To drag the sleds we would wear man-harnesses of leather and canvas that fitted under the armpits and around the waist. Two weeks in them left your belly trim and rock-hard and they (like Antarctic burials) were always something I thought of patenting and marketing in this land of opulence and obesity.

  At the end of the meeting, Paul and I moved away from Alec’s end of the room together, Paul carrying the book he’d brought to the meeting with him. I was surprised to see that it was not some work on ornithology but Shakespeare’s Tragedies. The committee which had endowed the expedition with books had seen to it that we did not go into Antarctica without the backing of the Bard and the Bible.

  ‘Improving yourself, Paul?’ I idly asked.

  He opened the volume where his marker was. The page was somewhere in Act III of Hamlet. I saw a few lines marked with pencil by Paul or an earlier reader. They are the lines in which Hamlet decides to face his mother and accuse her of her insensitivity in marrying Uncle Claudius so soon after her husband’s death.

  ‘Soft! Now to my mother.

  O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever

  The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom!

  Let me be cruel, not unnatural:

  I will speak daggers to her, but use none …’

  I did not read these words one by one, but saw them at a glance, knowing them from my performances as Hamlet in the sixth-form play at a Midlands grammar school.

  ‘Of course,’ said Paul, ‘you don’t realize when you’re a schoolboy how strange a play it is. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells Hamlet that Claudius killed him and Hamlet must avenge the murder. But Hamlet’s the only one throughout the play who actually hears the ghost speak, and so he could be quite deluded about what the ghost said, the ghost’s message could have arisen purely out of Hamlet’s deranged mind.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, not very interested.

  ‘And on the basis of that message all those deaths take place. Hamlet’s mother, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, the King, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And I ask myself how such a mad young man as Hamlet can be a universal hero. And as an orphan – a more or less fatherless child – I think I have the answer. Hamlet expresses all the resentment men have against their fathers. And he doesn’t do it shamefully. He does it with the sanction of a ghost.’

  I laughed. ‘You make enjoying Hamlet sound like an act of father hatred.’

  ‘For all but fatherless sons,’ he said.

  Barry Fields, who was night watchman that night, woke me from the finest sleep of the week. I had been slumbering vacantly, with no undecided questions lying about my brain to fester into dreams. I didn’t give a damn who Victor’s new intimate might have been, I knew the Mulroys hadn’t done the crime. I did not even dream of actresses and Lady Anthea Hurley. Until, from the vegetable innocence of my sleep, Barry, dressed in a greatcoat – for the stove was allowed to burn down a little at night – woke me by shining his storm lantern in my face.

  The sleep had been so cleansing that I woke as I had slept, with a blank mind. I didn’t know who I was, who Barry was, what the dark place might be in which he shone his lantern. Then I thought it was England, and that I was being roused early for farm work.

  He said, ‘The bastard’s been foxing us.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He might be mad but he’s been watching us watch him.’

  My brain had begun to light up in the manner of a stage set; hut, Erebus, doglines, sound, mountains.

  ‘He saw us looking for him. He’s mad, but that isn’t always the same as being a fool. That midden, it was a sort of stage designer’s garbage dump. He put it there to make us believe he lived way up the glacier. It was in a place we couldn’t miss. I mean we thought we were bloody clever to find it, but really we couldn’t have missed it, right there in a hollow. He kept it dusted clear of snow and he even put in a few pudding tins, which was a touch of some kind of genius. When I think of how pleased we were with ourselves. You can’t help admiring the bastard. Because he doesn’t live up there at all.’

  I was now myself excited. I could feel, as if they were partly interior to me, the complexities of Forbes-Chalmers’ approach to us. He sets a beacon of refuse in our path but it is in the wrong direction, for perhaps he does not say aloud, even inside his head, that he wants a meeting. Yet somehow or other he hopes we’ll take a second thought, like the thought we now had.

  I began getting up from my bunk. ‘We can bring him back for breakfast.’ I was casting about for my pants and my windproofs.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t go now.’ He was night watchman. He could not go chasing recluses.

  I remembered I myself had a meeting in the morning. Alec and Paul Gabriel. It was to do with the Emperor egg journey.

  Barry laughed, his teeth prominent in the lantern light. ‘It’s like fishing. We can feel that electric presence at the far end of the line. After the egg meeting’ll do fine. He’s been here forty-two months and he isn’t going away at this late hour.’

  Barry picked up his lantern from the floor.

  ‘Listen, don’t die in your sleep,’ he told me, as he often did last thing at night.

  Barry saw him first, a stone’s throw to our right, atop a low ridge. In the soft darkness his figure gave off a slight electric luminosity, as if he had somehow inhaled the aurora.

  We were now a few miles north of the hut, the shoreline to our left, and Forbes-Chalmers displaying himself on our right like a man who wanted to be forced into introductions. I saw him only in the instant before he turned to run, taking a direction a little to our rear, towards the high flue of Erebus. In the second before he disappeared I had the impression that he ran crookedly, with a shuffle. Excited by the sight of him, I did not ask myself any rational questions. I coiled myself for pursuit and was already taking my first stride when Barry pulled me back.

  ‘Not that way,’ he insisted. ‘This way.’ And he pointed down the sound in a direction opposite to the one Forbes-Chalmers had taken. I don’t know why I obeyed Barry but found myself sprinting with him round a wide bay, heading away from the line of Forbes-Chalmers’s departure. We were moving fast for men so heavily clothed. The hope and excitement inherent in sighting Forbes-Chalmers for the first time had made me an athlete again. The black sides of volcanic boulders, which, facing the south wind, gathered no snow, showed up in my jolting vision as points of reference. When we were near them I turned inland, running up the ridge to my right. Barry turned a second after me. We could sense there was a defile beyond the ridge where Forbes-Chalmers, having tried to give us a wrong direction in the first place, was now creeping homewards.

  It was a very shallow defile we saw from the ridge, more a small open valley, and for a second it was easy to see Forbes-Chalmers jogging along its far slope. Then he saw us, that we were ahead of him. He jumped behind one of those mounds of volcanic rubble that are half snowed up, half bared by the wind. We ran slantwise across the valley to find him there. Because we were so eager to see his face, because we wanted to read his eremite history in it, we ran direct and together. One of us with surer instincts for pursuit should have mounted the far side of the depression and come down on the mound from above. When we got to the place there was no one there. The mound provided a line of concealment Forbes-Chalmers had used to mount the far rise, to vanish farther inland. We were dealing with a native.

  Barry began kicking a frozen heap of rubble and slanging his intelligence. There was now no clear way to go.

  ‘North,’ I told
him, taking the onus as if I was certain.

  ‘D’you reckon?’

  I nodded. ‘North.’

  We turned again and mounted the rise by which Forbes-Chalmers had slithered away. I think Barry was depressed. But I had more strongly than ever the sense of a game, a child’s game in which ultimately even the fastest and most cunning child wishes to be caught so that he can be praised by the chasers.

  From the top of the new ridge we could see Mount Bird, minor relative of Erebus and Terror, and the gentle slopes of a wide beach. On its upper edge Forbes-Chalmers shuffled along, delineated by the moonglow from the north. There was something about the shape and the amble of the body that disturbed me but I did not ask myself about it, I suppressed the question.

  He did to us twice more what he had done in the defile. He must have accustomed himself to the contours of that shore so well that he could hide himself without having to think. He threw himself behind boulders, and even though we moved on them from two directions, he was not there when we arrived. We jogged inland a little and saw him again, moving north and looking as tired as we were ourselves. The sweat had frozen on our faces and felt not so much cold as itchy. We took off our outer gloves and scratched our cheeks with our mittened hands as we jogged after the shape. He disappeared again in a small depression but could be seen on yet another beach, making for a small low cape at the far end. We followed him, no more than a sprint behind him but not confident of catching him. I wondered if his strange crooked walk was an element of the game, a mime of our clumsiness. He got to the line of the cape and rushed ten yards up its side. Though we got to the point ourselves within twenty seconds, he was not in sight. I put my hand out to stop Barry sprinting any farther.

  ‘This is it!’ I told Barry.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is the place. Otherwise he’d show himself. He hasn’t shown himself because he’s home.’

  ‘What if it isn’t a bloody game?’ Barry asked, rather loudly.

  ‘If it isn’t a game, we’re never going to catch him anyhow.’

  Instantly I saw a small cliff on the far side of the cape. Beneath the cliff lay a large accumulation of ice.

  ‘There,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Barry.

  Soon we were walking along the face of this ice heap. I had no doubt it was the place, permanent, sheltered from south winds, close to the creatures of the seashore. We looked for a vent or chimney and a spume of blubber smoke. We tested the face of the ice with our hands and our boots.

  At the far end the toe of my boot struck no resisting surface. I dropped on to my knees and found a small hole six inches square. As I pulled snow away from it I saw a crude entryway constructed of timber and canvas.

  ‘Here!’ I whispered as if I were in church. I was so elated at this material evidence I could have dug the whole hill away.

  Barry came, squatted, and began digging with me. We worked madly but clumsily with our gloved hands. I heard the voice first. ‘Not in there,’ it said. I stopped digging and nudged Barry to stop. We heard the voice clearly though it was muffled.

  ‘Not in there. That’s the meat store.’

  Ten yards away a furry-gloved hand had emerged from the ice embankment. It held back a flap of canvas and so revealed a second hole.

  ‘Come in,’ the voice said. ‘Since that’s what you want.’

  It occurred to me that he might wish to pole-axe us both as we travelled on hands and knees into his cave. I hung back, reluctant to go first. But Barry apparently had no fear of narrow places or death at the far end of tunnels and was already dropping to his knees for the journey. Crazily, I felt bound to push in front of him. ‘I found the place,’ I told him.

  The tunnel was an arm’s span high and scarcely any longer and as soon as I bent my head to enter it I could see an interior, poorly lit, and knew that my host had lifted an inner flap of canvas to let us through. As I emerged from the tunnel to the main chamber, he would be standing over me, someone who had already and easily fractured Victor’s skull-base.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. As if we were delaying him from an important task. ‘Come on.’

  When I was through he let me rise to my full height. The room must have been six feet high, for I could easily stand. Forbes-Chalmers himself had to stoop slightly beneath the ceiling of timber he had constructed in here. The floor too was of boards, probably lumber Holbrooke had left behind him. The walls of course were of ice. The whole place measured perhaps eight feet long and six wide.

  A storm lantern primed with seal oil shed light, and by it I looked at Forbes-Chalmers. He grinned at me almost toothlessly from a mess of auburn and grey whiskers. His face seemed tanned, even though the sun had not shone for two months. His eyes seemed very bright. His breath stank blindingly.

  ‘Of course you’re welcome,’ he said. His voice had a Scottish edge. ‘You and your friend.’

  Barry stood beside me now, looking very shy and stooping awkwardly.

  ‘Sit, sit, sit,’ said Forbes-Chalmers. ‘Over there, by the stove.’

  He pointed to a wooden crate that stood against the far wall. A few feet from it was an unlit blubber stove, just like Warren Mead’s. Forbes-Chalmers had probably had it on overnight, and the ice walls, wondrous insulators, kept the heat in.

  ‘Sit on it,’ said Forbes-Chalmers, meaning sit on the crate. He himself sat on a bunk opposite us.

  ‘It isn’t a bad place,’ he said. He did not take off his coat, for it was not much above freezing point in here, but he dragged his gloves off his hands. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Very fine,’ I said.

  ‘I’m Barry Fields,’ said Barry.

  ‘And I’m Anthony Piers.’

  ‘Delighted. Now first I excavated this room as a pit, six feet by eight. I then laid down some wooden roofing. I forgot the weight of accumulated snow would bow it and now I pay the price of that omission, since I can’t quite stand up in here. I suppose in that I’m characteristic of mankind.’

  Barry said, ‘Were you with Holbrooke’s expedition?’

  ‘I try to keep the temperature just a few degrees above freezing so there’s no melt water running off the walls. But you’ll notice that I’ve provided ice gutters either side of the floor where any water running off the walls can collect and refreeze during the night. I’m very snug here.’

  He patted his bunk.

  ‘Why don’t you live in Holbrooke’s hut?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t trust the carpentry,’ he said. ‘How can you trust the carpentry of a man like that? Besides, no one wants to live with memories. And the hut – it’s replete with unpleasant memories. It’s a better thing to leave home, to make your own little hutch. I don’t complain. My name’s Malcolm Chalmers. I’m twenty-eight years old. Last winter most of my teeth fell out.’

  He opened his mouth to show us and we could smell him again. I saw Barry bow his head, blinking away the stench.

  ‘I thought it was scurvy,’ said the man who was now suddenly Chalmers. ‘But I didn’t get depressed as men do with scurvy. And I can get around, you know, though I’m not as strong as I was.’

  ‘Did you hurt your arm?’ Barry asked. For Chalmers kept his right arm close to his side, even when he sat, and it was this that had given him his crooked gait as he ran ahead of us.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘That was 1908, the day after New Year’s. I killed a seal, put it on the sled. Was dragging it when the sled stuck on an incline. Over there. I mean, the runners jammed. I was working it free I suppose when the struts cracked and the superstructure fell on my arm. I wept, I can tell you.’

  As he told the story he took his windproof coat off, and a sweater and a yellowed thermal shirt, and at last showed us the arm. The upper bicep was full and strong, but below it was a cruel crush mark. The lower arm was dead white and withered. There was no power in it – you could tell by the way it hung, by its lack of tone.

  ‘I wept, I can tell you,’ said Chalmers. ‘But it’s
funny how you can live with one arm. Things are a little slower to do. That’s all.’

  ‘We had a friend who died,’ Barry said. ‘His name was Victor. He was a bit of a bastard. Did you know him?’

  I heard the question but sat in my own fug of disappointment. The murder had achieved a particular Edwardian ripeness, in that Chalmers could not have imposed those symmetrical bruises on Victor’s throat.

  Chalmers was thinking of Victors he had known. ‘There was a Victor in Edinburgh. McGlashen. A medical student. When you say a friend, you mean a colleague? From your hut? I mean to say, I had colleagues but they weren’t all friends. John Forbes was my friend and I …’

  ‘What happened to John Forbes?’ I asked.

  ‘Why didn’t you go back to your colleagues?’ Barry reiterated. ‘I mean Holbrooke was still here, all that autumn, the whole winter and most of the summer. Just four miles down the coast.’

  ‘Oh the questions,’ Chalmers said with a little laugh. ‘I didn’t like Holbrooke, I didn’t trust Holbrooke. I didn’t trust his carpentry. I didn’t want his questions, questions.’ Chalmers began tugging at his whiskers.

  I could see he might order us out and we would have the painful choice then of obeying him or trying to control him in that small cell of ice. ‘I’m sorry. We’re pestering you,’ I said.

  ‘No, no. I don’t mind you two. You’re like John Forbes or Stuart Clift. Honest men. Tough.’ He coughed. ‘I noticed when you built that hut last summer, there was a priest there, dedicating it or something. There was a priest wearing all the priestly gear. He prayed for the hut and all of you stood around in a semicircle.’

  ‘That’s right, Malcolm,’ said Barry, struggling for familiarity but sounding like a salesman. Forbes-Chalmers noticed as much.

  ‘Malcolm. It sounds unfamiliar. Of course it’s a good few years since I talked with anyone. I was wondering if that priest was still with you?’