by Barbara Vine
At the top of the mountain we left the train for a few minutes to stand with icy feet in the snow and hot faces held up to the sun: Then the clouds welled up from beneath us, drowning us in thick wet whiteness, as cold as snow. I made the downward trip in the same carriage as Ivo, who had made it twice before. There was no one else with us. The others were all crowded at the front of the train. I was looking out of the window on the side the botanist had looked when we were coming up. Thin streams of white waterfall threaded down the mountainside between the flowers and the green mosses. A downward smoke, as someone called it in some poem. Tennyson, maybe.
‘If I can get hold of a replacement on the next trip I’ll leave the ship at Prince Rupert and come to Oregon with you.’
There’s something terrible about being given a piece of news the speaker thinks will delight you but which is in fact the last thing you want to hear. In my case, I hadn’t even imagined hearing it. You might say, I’d never thought of that.
‘I’ve already spoken to Louise about it.’ Louise Conway was the cruise director. ‘She would be quite agreeable if I could get Oliver.’
‘Who’s Oliver?’ I said.
‘Oliver Davies. He’s a geologist at Berkeley, very young but he’s already published quite successfully. A possible Stephen Jay Gould of the future. I know him, we’ve met a few times, and he once told me he’d like the cruise job if he could get it. Of course he doesn’t know the Panhandle like I do but he’s been here, he loves it here and he’d learn while he was working. The money’s good and he always needs money.’
I didn’t look at him, I was looking at the downward smoke through a veil of rain. I said Ivo could hardly get hold of this Oliver Davies before Friday. He shook his head. His smile was rueful.
‘It may look remote here, Tim, but there are no inaccessible places in the world any longer. Not in America there aren’t, and we’re in America, we’re in the United States. Things have changed since the gold rush and Soapy Sam and Frank Reid had their gun battle on Juneau dock. Alaskans have as highly sophisticated a telephone system now as the rest of the States.’
There was nothing to say. I had never imagined this might happen. The doors of a complex trap seemed to be closing about me. I could almost feel the cold metal of the bars as I brought my face up against them and peered wildly out. Ivo said he’d phone Oliver Davies from the Golden North Hotel and leave a message if he couldn’t get him.
With the rest of the party I explored Skagway, saw the Red Onion Saloon that used to have a brothel upstairs and went to the curio shop where they have the biggest gold nugget in the world on a watch chain. I looked at everything without seeing. My thoughts were bent on escape, while I knew there was no escape. You can get away from Skagway by road, you aren’t dependent on ships or helicopters. Inside my trap but looking out, I listened hungrily while Fergus told us the start of the Klondike Highway was here, travelling northwest into the Canadian Yukon. It’s some measure of the state I was in that I speculated about how far I would get if I stole a car and tried to drive myself to Whitehorse.
But we don’t stay in states; we change. Consciousness alters all the time, attitudes are in a condition of perpetual flux. I learnt that in Alaska. The frightful intense, panicky fear that Ivo’s announcement in the train had cast me into lasted only half an hour. He came back as we returned to the Favonia to say he hadn’t been able to locate Oliver Davies. He’d left a message that he would call again from Sitka or Davies could call him or Louise Conway on the ship.
My heart lightened at once. Davies had probably gone away somewhere, he’d never be found in time. But Ivo’s failure to find him and its effect on me made me feel much warmer towards him. This is an aspect of my character that I despise, the way a sudden relief, an influx of the pleasurable alleviating of anxiety, can make me feel something like love for whoever is with me; can make me feel what certainly passes for love in its effect on the other person. Or could once. There isn’t much opportunity now and perhaps, anyway, I’ve changed. I came close to reviving my feelings for Ivo when he told me Oliver Davies couldn’t be found. In his cabin, to which I followed him, I put my arms round him, I kissed him, I told him not to be too disappointed. What did two weeks of separation matter? We should soon be together again.
Why did I? Was I mad? Why did I pretend to want him and need him, to lust after him? When he pushed the chair against the door, jammed its back under the door handle and piled his backpack on it to add to the weight, when he pulled me down on to the floor and began his fierce love-making, why did I contrive an ecstatic response? Why did I?
To keep him sweet, for a quiet life, not to make trouble, not to be unkind, because it was easier. Because I was in a trap and I wasn’t the kind of person who hurls himself against walls and bars until he is stunned and bleeding. I was the kind who sleeps with the enemy. I was the kind who joins them because I can’t beat them. Perhaps I still am. I don’t know.
Ivo gave the lecture that evening. His subject was glaciers and the ‘calving’ of icebergs. I don’t remember what he said, I don’t remember the slides that went with his talk, or if the lecture hall was full or half-empty. My memory is of the conversation that took place afterwards, in the Favonia lounge, when seven of us sat round a table with our drinks: Ivo and I, Betsy and Megan, the Donizettis and Dr Ruffle.
Mary Donizetti had been reading a murder mystery that she had taken from the ship’s library, a couple of shelves of books that passengers had left behind them on previous trips. It made her ask if anyone had set such a book in Alaska. There were so many opportunities, she said, for killing someone.
On the Mendenhall Glacier, for instance, when the guide told them about the coldness and profound depths of the blue water gullies that cut channels through the ice, she had looked down and thought how quickly it might be done. And who would know?
‘I’d no notion you were cherishing these murderous thoughts, my dear,’ said Donizetti. ‘Who was to be your victim? Myself? Or Elianne? I seem to recall she’d been overly troublesome that morning.’
‘There was nothing personal in it. When someone tells you, the way the guide told us, that if you fell into a certain stretch of water no one could pull you out and you’d be dead in seconds, you can’t help thinking that way. And then, up on the mountain today, with those sheer rock faces …’
‘If there was no one by to see you,’ said Betsy, ‘you could just tip a person over and, like you say, who’s to know?’
‘Nature is so extreme here.’ This was Ruffle. ‘I think I’m right in saying that tomorrow we’ll be in icy waters where no swimmer could survive for more than a minute or two.’
‘Or less than a minute or two,’ said Ivo. ‘It won’t be much warmer than up on the Mendenhall. These are fiords, this is glacial water. Human beings don’t have a seal’s coat or a seal’s blubber. But it’s of no importance as no one is going to fall off this ship, still less be pushed.’
I could tell he didn’t care for this talk. To him it degraded the wonder and beauty of the place. He tried to change the subject by speaking of icebergs in Antarctica, where I knew he longed to go. He began on the Filchner Ice Shelf, from which three years before a huge piece had broken off and, splitting into three, floated off into the Weddell Sea, where it covered an area of I don’t remember how many thousand square kilometres. Ivo loved talking about these huge icebergs, putting forward reasons for why they broke away when they did, but the others wouldn’t have this, they were intent on easy ways of doing murder in a murder-favouring environment.
Did this conversation have any influence over me when the time came? I don’t think so. The means I used, after all, was never mentioned, Megan putting forward the suggestion that you might present your victim to a grizzly bear. Betsy seemed to know everything about grizzly bears, of whom the world’s largest concentration were to be found on the island we were circumnavigating, and told one anecdote after another of friends who had been menaced or attacked by them. Profe
ssor Donizetti wanted to know if the hemlock which grew all over the mountains here was the same hemlock as Socrates used to make an end to himself. No one knew. The party broke up with various members of it promising to consult the classicists and botanists among the vast numbers of academics they knew.
Ivo kissed me gently and lay beside me for a while in the narrow bunk. After he’d gone I stayed awake for a long time, wondering how I was going to tell him, how I was going to stop him leaving the ship with me when I left it, how I was going to make him understand about Isabel. But when I fell asleep at last the dreams I had were of sheets of grey water in which icebergs floated, some as big as houses, some no larger than a piece of stone in a rock garden. Behind towered the mountains with their snowy summits and between them in the valleys hung the rivers of ice. The heads of seals rose above the water, shaggy and dog-like, but as they drifted closer to the ship’s side I saw that they had the faces of men.
This image kept returning in dream after dream. My mind confused dreams with icebergs, they followed close upon one another in the same sort of way, each a little different, but a seemingly endless progression. And the seals with men’s faces came in procession too, changing at one point into the discarded bottles in my bedroom at the Goncharof, bottles floating in choppy grey water, each one containing a letter or message, the writing visible but too far away to read.
When I couldn’t stand any more of it I got up. It was only a bit after five. I felt like the man who was drowned in a barrel of wine and who said of a night like mine that he wouldn’t pass another such, not though it bought him a world of happy days. Going on to the observation deck, staircase after staircase and finally a spiral one, I fancied I should be alone up there to stare at the sea like Napoleon on St Helena, but it was already quite crowded. The avifauna people were there with their field-glasses and their cameras, getting very excited about a pair of tiny brown birds barely visible to the naked eye. And instead of the open sea, which I’d imagined must be out there, we were entering a fiord where the waters were like my dream, tumbling with clots of ice. But it wasn’t grey, the sky was an unclouded blue and the sun had come up fierce and golden from behind the high mountains at the head of the bay.
After three people had asked me what had become of my binoculars I went back to fetch them, and coming up again met Ivo who made me go up on the bridge with him. He said the captain wouldn’t mind so long as we didn’t get in the way of instruments. I let Ivo take my hand for a moment at the foot of the spiral stairs. He did something he had never done before, brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. The effect of this was strange, it made me shiver, but not with disgust, certainly not that, and not with desire either. I think it was with fear.
I suppose it was a triumph of navigation, getting the Favonia in there. Ivo said it was, talking to me later when we were close up near the mouth of the glacier and the icebergs were all around us. On the bridge we had to keep silent and simply watch. She was a small ship, the bigger ones couldn’t get in there, the passage was too shallow and treacherous. The sun turned the water to gold, it made a great gold pathway through the blue, and the boulders and spars and rocks of ice were silver stained with gold on their sunny side. We came up that gleaming path and the glacier ahead of us was too bright to look at, a white dazzlement caverned and fissured with blue.
In those moments I began to understand why Ivo wanted to come, and come again and again. I even had ideas, rather stupid and sentimental I suppose, about being able to lose oneself here, to lose the self, and be made pure and new. I saw seal heads in the bright sparkling water and they had the faces of seals, a cat crossed with a dog and much be-whiskered. A pair of eagles watched the progress of the ship from their perch in the high bushy crown of a spruce tree. In the unclouded sky the hot sun mounted.
I’ve even wondered if Emily Hadfield might be the sender of the castaway pieces. The Maid of Athens journal being by an Emily – Emily Wooldridge – and a ship called Emily in another story, made me suspect. But the next one that came disproved this theory, if the postmarks hadn’t already done so.
Robert Jeffery was an eighteen-year-old boy from Cornwall, England, a seaman on board the naval sloop, HMS Recruit. In 1807 the ship sailed for the Caribbean to join the Leeward Islands station.
Her captain was Warwick Lake, the Honourable, youngest son of General Viscount Lake, a one-time harsh commander of British forces in Ireland. The son was not much better. His own brutality was reflected in the conduct of officers and crew. During the Recruit’s Atlantic crossing many men were flogged, mostly for drunkenness and disobedience. Young Robert Jeffery was put in irons for two days and later received twenty-four lashes for no more serious offence than helping himself to a mouthful of the gunner’s rum.
Apparently undeterred by this punishment, a few days later he stole a cask of spruce beer. The matter was reported to Captain Lake. Jeffery might have expected even severer punishment but at first nothing happened. The Recruit was at this time in the Anegada Passage, a wide sea lane east of the Virgin Islands, in the midst of which lies the barren rocky islet of Sombrero, so named for its resemblance in shape to a Spanish hat.
That Sunday afternoon Captain Lake came on deck and asked the Master: ‘Have we not some thieves on board?’ On being told that there were two, one of them being Jeffery, he pronounced a punishment for the lad so astounding that few could at first believe what they heard.
Having first told Jeffery that he wanted none such as he on board, he said that he intended to set him ashore alone on Sombrero and that this was to be his ‘doom’. One officer dared to protest but in fact there was no opportunity for dissent. Lake’s word was law. The word ‘Thief’ was painted on a piece of canvas and sewn on to the back of Jeffery’s shirt. Then he was put ashore, on to a bare desolate rock almost forty miles from the nearest inhabited land.
The Honourable Warwick Lake was court-martialled for this offence, stripped of his rank and dismissed from the navy. Not then, not till much later, was it known that Jeffery had been rescued from Sombrero by an American schooner. He was taken to Marblehead on the coast of Massachusetts, where he ultimately settled, returning to his old trade of blacksmith.
There will be no court martial for you. A suitable judicial process would be a trial for murder in the first degree.
That came yesterday in an envelope postmarked San Luis Obispo, California. Does the last sentence constitute a threat? The piece has told me more about the writer than any of the previous ones. Although the spelling is English English, he or she is American. I can see that in the way he has written ‘Cornwall, England’, which no English person would do. Also, I believe I’m right in thinking we don’t have different degrees of murder under our system, only murder or manslaughter.
This afternoon, talking about Peter Grimes, I asked Julius if he’d ever heard the story of Robert Jeffery. I didn’t have to say any more because he had, he knew all about the court martial, and even about all the political uproar caused by the resulting efforts to improve conditions in the navy. So this one is true too. Julius said it would make a good opera and it could be called The Island of Doom.
The Favonia dropped her anchor and we went down to breakfast. The sun shone for half a day. We saw whales spout and their forked tails lash the surface of the water. Returning down the long inlet, the old lady who got about on sticks but was eagle-eyed spotted a black bear with its twin cubs standing on a little green lawn. Everyone rushed up on deck to look and the first rain of the day, a burst of it from the gathering clouds, struck our faces.
Glaciers, glaciers, glaciers and Ivo was in his element, literally in it. He was indifferent to the rain, unaffected by the dense, cold mist that formed the centre of a fallen cloud. All the time we were moving, making our slow progress between the rocks and the floating ice, he was with one group or another, talking glaciers, how they came into being, how they declined, how their formation and their passing changed the landscape.
That was
the day, the next day, when parties of us first embarked in the small boats, the Zodiacs which the ship carried. We had a lecture on how to conduct ourselves. It was Ivo who allotted to each of us, the lecturers and the cruise director as well as the passengers, a numbered tag on a ring, red on one side, black on the other, its number in white. These tags hung on hooks on a pegboard near the embarkation point. When we went out in the Zodiacs we were each to take a life-jacket, then to turn our personal tag over so that the red face showed. When we came back we were to take off our life-jackets and turn the tag to the black face. This was to ensure that no one was ever left behind. We were forbidden – insofar as paying adults on holiday can be forbidden anything – ever to turn someone else’s tag. I still remember my number and I remember Ivo’s.
Mine was 22 and his was 76. I can never see or hear those numbers with indifference. They are not so much magic numbers for me as fatal numbers, each of them invested with the power to stop me in whatever I am doing, to arrest me and take me back to that time, to run a cold thread down my spine, to ring in my ears and echo there: 22 and 76.
Ivo took charge of one Zodiac, Megan the other. We were not to land this time but to explore a certain long inlet, too narrow and too shallow for the Favonia to venture into. The glaciers were left behind, and the ice floes. Rain forest was all about us, dripping spruce and hemlock, water drops glittering on the red salmonberries that are food for bears, white flowers and yellow, and one that even I knew the name of, the columbine of English cottage gardens, though never orange-coloured as it is in the Tongass Forest.
It was Lotos Eater country in there, the fiord like a still stream ‘between walls of shadowy granite in a gleaming pass’, long-leaved flowers weeping from among the ivies and the deep mosses. The waterfalls, slender white threads, fell and paused and fell, the way Tennyson said they did. But he was writing about a warm place and it was cold in the Tongass, no dark blue sky vaulted above a dark blue sea. The mist descended in a white wall just as Ivo was telling us to look over there, to see the mountain goats up near the snow-line.