The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  She felt her face grow hot. She propped her cheeks in her hands, to disguise it.

  ‘And you looked so sad, and there was no one else for you to talk to.’ He paused. ‘It made me sad to see you so sad.’

  She said nothing for a moment, then settled on a vague lie. ‘I think I’m homesick.’

  ‘Yeah, I know all about that. But don’t waste too much time thinking of home. Because you’ll find that when you’re back, you’ll miss it here.’

  ‘How do you think about base, when you’re home?’

  ‘It’s strange, you know. Every year, I come down here for four, six, ten weeks and I get bored, I miss my wife – my ex-wife, now. I miss the children. I used to have to stop myself from getting in the cockpit and flying the damn plane home. But no matter what happens, afterwards I always remember it fondly.’ Luke gave her confused smile. ‘I remember the good parts.’

  She said, ‘I’ll miss you.’

  ‘Miss me?’

  ‘When you’re away from base.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’ll be back soon enough.’ There was a closed, satisfied quality to Luke’s voice. She had given him something he had not quite earned, and he knew it. He was trying to brush off an innocent comment between friends, while actually hoarding secret pleasure in it. His reaction was all the worse for being nearly invisible, and because she had spoken the truth.

  Luke left, slipping out of the bar without saying goodbye. He might have a rule against the word, like his don’t-look back dictum. She realised she had never heard him use it; he always said, see you next week, or take care. Perhaps pilots never said goodbye, she reasoned, in case it was for real.

  4

  Luke stood on the hangar apron, a windswept rectangle of gravel at the bottom of a grimy glacier. How many times had he stood there before, taking in this exact view, the ice in the bay, inert and frozen, or in spiralling motion, depending on the season? The ring of mountains in the distance. Skuas and blue-eyed shags coming in to land. Yes, this would be his last season. His heart soared at the thought. But also he felt that cunning sensation in his stomach, of the kind he only had when he was in real danger.

  He catalogued the conditions: wind a good 25 knots or so, but not cold, maybe plus four or five. These days in January temperatures hardly dropped below freezing. In part it was due to the lack of night; twenty-four-hour solar energy prevented the temperature from falling. But then there was the warming: in the ten years he’d been flying, he had watched the ice retreat, stealthily at first, then with a consuming dissolution. All around them, the glaciers were pulling back, folding into themselves. Ten years before, the glacier above base still ran down to within a few feet of the runway and the average daytime temperature in summer was minus two. They had to look out for dewpoints, then, for icing in low cloud. These days the problem was fog. At times base became so cloaked in fog he had to lie up in the field for days, waiting for a weather window.

  In the distance he saw a Gator approach, struggling down a pile of rubble driven by two red jackets in identical pairs of polarised sunglasses. The black and red and fluorescent orange everyone wore in the Antarctic was deliberate, of course – bright-coloured clothing could be more easily spotted in the white vortex of the ice sheet, should someone become lost, or need to be uplifted. And the sunglasses to keep the light at bay, which would otherwise corkscrew right through your corneas.

  The scientists aboard, he took the plane swiftly into the air. The Otters were so eager to fly, they snagged on the thinnest of winds. He changed their heading for the far side of Porquoi Pas Island. Karol (or was it Karoly?, yes that was it, he was terrible with names) and Alexa (he remembered just in time) would photograph the shrinking glaciers there.

  When the plane had reached a secure altitude, Luke allowed his mind to wander; he remembered his first sight of her, lugging a suitcase down the ship’s gangplank and onto a Gator: a small, miserable-looking woman. In his experience, arriving in the Antarctic elicited either euphoria or a sinking dread, and for Nara it was the latter, he could tell straight away. And why not? She had left everything behind and flown across the world, only to arrive in this hardscrabble place, with its cold, repellent beauty.

  By the end of the day this marine biologist woman would be installed in an impersonal pitroom, she would have had her mug shot taken by the base doctor in the surgery, assigned a little plastic rectangle with her surname on it for the tagging board, inducted into the procedure of signing in and out of the log book. She would wonder why she had imprisoned herself at the end of the world. She would know that eighteen months or two years – depending on which contract she had signed – of this life awaited her, living in a granite quarry on a peninsula in the Antarctic. Far, far away from anyone she had ever known or who had ever loved her, off the map, over the edge of the known world.

  She had been good company on their trip, which had turned out to be so much more eventful than he had bargained for. So many people turned into whining children when things did not go their way, stuck in an unpleasant situation by forces beyond their control. He took Nara’s behaviour as a mark of maturity as well as grace. Threaded through her grace was a cord of tensile strength, slightly dark and virile, which he put down to a toughened grip of mind rather than body. Somewhere along the line, he thought, this woman had been tested.

  Over the years he had observed a thing or two about the kind of people who came to The Ice. There were people who live by the truth versus those who can accommodate illusion, fantasy. They were so different, like the sun and the moon. To live under the beam of the sun is to have clarity and an upright, uncompromised splendour of the kind he knew in his life, before the divorce. Then there were those who came, far fewer in number, who were of a romantic disposition, people who slid from the darkness holding bunches of flowers in their minds. These were the people who said goodbye even if they were only going for a walk.

  Nara was one of the flower-profferers, eager with gifts. Although he also recognised in her the coolness of the scientist. She would want to know the facts, the processes. She wanted to know why. But she did not give him the impression, as did so many women, of keeping herself locked away, a box inside a box inside another box; but what was actually in the box? He had to admit he was tired of the mystery of women. He wanted someone open, without secrets – if that were possible.

  ‘Ok,’ Karoly said, ‘let’s go do these lines.’ He pointed to a map cross-sectioned with grids of varying colours. Coal Nunatak, Moider Glacier, Dalgliesh Bay, Corner Ciffs, Nemo Cove, the Foyn Coast.

  Luke wished he could show Nara these – he would hardly call them places; they were no more than formations, and small ones at that, marooned in a landscape of radical emptiness. Naming was a cartographic necessity, and as a pilot he needed these names; in an age of dependence on GPS, he often still flew by the landscape. But they also signified for him a touching if ultimately futile attempt to bestow meaning on a place which simply rejected it. This rebuff appealed to him: too many wars had been fought over place-names, rivers and valleys and industrial plains and mountain ranges. What a relief, he thought, to be somewhere there had never been a war, never had blood shed for it, apart from the accidental terrifying deaths the Antarctic exacted.

  With a subtle sway of his wrist, they changed course. For the first time in a long time, Luke found he was seeing for two. He wanted to show Nara the bays, glaciers, nunataks – the peaks of near-invisible mountains buried in the ice sheet. He realised his mind had not only wandered on the thought of Nara, as it would wander when thinking of his children, his ex-wife, his friends back home, of sex, of food he wanted to try, of ways to invest the money he earned. It had snagged on her, a fish on a hook. Nara would be moved by all this, he knew. It was not that the scientists who now rumbled around the back of the Otter, checking laptops, outputs, line feeds, sensors, were not sufficiently awed; they were. But somehow their awe was incomplete and unearned. As he soared in and out of thermals, threading through brawny
mountains, Luke found a feeling creeping upon him for these two harmless near-strangers, a feeling he suddenly had to fight hard to keep at bay: a watery intolerance, a commonplace derision, simply because they were not her.

  ‘Look at that ice stream outflow!’ Alexa pointed downward, about three o’clock, to where a glacier’s gigantic white tongue lolled, falling into the sea.

  ‘That’s up on last year,’ Karoly said. ‘I estimate about 20 per cent.’

  When he had first started working South, ten years ago now, the glaciologists had been cagey, predicting a thickening of the ice sheet in the middle, but a thinning at the edges. East Antarctica, they said, would increase its mass, while West Antarctica would begin an inexorable slide into the sea. He eavesdropped as the scientists recited a string of letters and numbers to each other. He would never have been a scientist, not because of his social station or education, or even his discovery that he was good at flying – no, he might have done anything. He could engage with the larger mysteries of science, the questions and the quests, and the increasing urgency to know what the future might hold. But the detail of it, the maths, the computer programmes, the numbers – they might as well be surgeons discussing a bypass operation.

  He indicated to Karoly, then pointed out the cockpit window. ‘That’s the Shambles glacier; it used to reach halfway out to Pinero Island.’

  Karoly smiled. ‘You’re right. Thanks.’ He turned around as if to move back into the fuselage, then returned, put on his headphones. ‘You don’t say much,’ he said. ‘So when you do, we figure it’s important.’

  Luke smiled, then, because this was the exact impression he sought to convey. He kept to himself because he had nothing to prove. He had ten years behind him, ten Antarctic seasons, he had the authenticity of the adventures which had befallen him in the ordinary pursuit of his job. He enjoyed the respect that came with the job, how when he told people what he did for a living they were invariably amazed and impressed. He basked in this, although not the fatally inert basking of the seal, the animal which soaks up sun because it lives for so long in the cold dark. He was known on base as a daring pilot, someone who pushed the envelope; dextrous, a natural pilot, he had a feel in his hands for the dynamics of air and lift.

  He flew them over what remained of the glacier, to more exclamations of dread from the scientists. Yes, it was too late to stop it now, the immense force of lubrication, of heat. The continent had been ignited from within. He longed to see this internal fire, lit by melt: oxygen-fed flames, red as Chinese silk, against the stark white of the ice sheet. He longed for it all to be burned up, consumed, ashes. Then he could finally go home.

  He banked and flew them straight into the sun, into the calm brilliance of the day-long morning, gold fluting across snow-sheets, then sinking into hungry shadows.

  That January base experienced a string of mild summer storms, and what would normally be snow fell as rain. On one of those stormed-in days Luke came by Nara’s office.

  ‘I just came by to see how you were doing.’

  She smiled. ‘I’m glad you came. I wanted to show you my animals.’

  They donned their padded jackets; the aquarium was always kept dark and cold, to simulate undersea conditions. Inside, eight large tanks were illuminated. Nara stopped at each to insert her arm and extract one of the creatures inside. She presented him with starfish, sea-spiders, sea squirts, giant sponges. He took them in his hands, a little hesitantly. ‘You never know what they might do,’ he joked. The truth was, he found the marine animals in the Antarctic threatening; the giant sponges, giant sea-spiders, the carnivorous, snake-like leopard seals. He could not believe the small woman in front of him willingly dove among them, beneath the ice.

  ‘Look – the sea-squirts have shrunk to half their normal size.’ She held one up for him. It looked like a soggy turnip, but shrivelled.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘I’m killing them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that we can know the upper temperature threshold of survivability. We put more and more carbon dioxide into the water, and raise the water temperature to see how warm the water needs to get before they are adversely affected,’ she said. ‘We’re trying to simulate the warming we expect to take place around the peninsula in the next fifty years or so.’

  ‘So you get a sense of when they might become extinct.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But you can’t do anything about it,’ he said. ‘I mean, to keep them alive. Long-term.’

  She placed the sea-squirt back in the water. ‘No.’

  They moved on, Nara checking the sea urchins with their disintegrating limestone shells, the brachiopods, the latumula clams which looked like antique Dutch shoes poking from under brocade gowns. These clams lived in the mud of the seabed floor, she told him; the only way to bring them to the surface was by box-coring, a form of dredging, she explained. They came up, gold flecks in cement-grey Antarctic sea-mud. ‘Fool’s gold clams, they used to be called.’

  The clams, he saw, were hooked to delicate monitors, like intensive care patients, tendrils of wire floating in the water like seaweed. ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘To monitor their heartbeat and rate of respiration.’

  ‘What does that tell you?’

  ‘How distressed they become, as we raise the temperature. They all have a different threshold at which they will stop functioning. We think they’ll be the first to become extinct.’

  He shook his head. ‘The thought of you spending the winter here, in this cold aquarium, watching all these animals die.’

  She looked at them, seeing them with Luke’s eyes, suddenly: small things, trapped in incubators. Babies, ventilators, warm skin. Incubators give life, not take it away, as she is doing. Their nervous systems frayed like bad electrical wiring.

  ‘In the Ellsworths you said you wanted to get away from someone,’ Luke said.

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t actually apply, you know. Or at least not intentionally. They rang me up because someone dropped out, and the interview panel knew my supervisor.’

  It was late May when she went up to Cambridge to the Polar Research Council for her interview. She had sat in a hot train carriage full of mothers with flush-faced babies melting in pushchairs. The job had initially been offered to a woman who had become – suddenly and unexpectedly, Nara assumed – pregnant, and they re-advertised the post.

  The panel fixed her with severe stares. Even now, twenty years after the first women wintered at Adelaide base, they said, the ratio of men to women was still three-quarters to one. ‘This can be a difficult environment,’ the chair of the panel – an eminent marine biologist – said. She would come under pressure to have a relationship, they told her, to pair off. How did she feel about that? She replied she didn’t think she was a peer pressure type. If she got pregnant in the Antarctic, they said, she would be taken out immediately. ‘The cost to the taxpayer for a winter medical evacuation is approximately three hundred and fifty thousand pounds,’ said the physicist.

  It was in her mind to say, I won’t get pregnant, no matter what. Or, If I do, I’ll pay the taxpayer back.

  ‘Mistakes are expensive,’ the biologist went on, ‘and not very easy to rectify. If you find out that it is a mistake for you to be on the continent after early April, we can’t fix it. If you pull out before, we won’t have time to find a replacement, and the science that year will be lost.’

  ‘These days people have such strange motives for going to the Antarctic,’ said another man – a physicist, she thought, although she could not be sure. ‘They want to get out of the world, get away from what’s happening.’

  ‘I’m not running away from the world. I’m going to the Antarctic.’

  They left her to find her way out of the building. Thank you, thank you. Nice to have met you. I’m sorry there’s no one to show you out. That’s fine, I remember the way.

  She did not remember the way. She wandered the
wide, blue-carpeted halls, taking what she thought would be her last chance to examine a world she had briefly brushed up against, but which would never be part of her life.

  The corridors were lined with large, lightbox-lit photographs of whales, penguins, ice-core drills, planes, ships, their hulls blood-bright against the ice. Down one particularly abandoned corridor she found the historic gallery – old expedition photos of men with beards and dogs, ice sculptures dripping from both noses. And her reflection, superimposed on penguins, on giant superstructures of bases-in-progress, or at least someone very much like her: a small woman, fine-featured, eyes two dark stones. She was judged pretty, she knew, by most men’s standards, but an indefinite quality in her, a stillness like a dark bowl, would always keep men away.

  The corridors were unusually wide; on each side were doors leading to offices or labs; each door had only a small slot window, like prison cells. She stayed there for some time, spying as white-coated scientists filtered seawater and slid trays in and out of mass spectrometers. When she finally found the reception area and the exit, it was by accident.

  They were outside the aquarium now, taking off their jackets. Nara offered to make him a cup of tea, to warm up. ‘So you see,’ she said, ‘I was second choice.’

  Luke shook his head. ‘I don’t see it that way. You were meant to get the job, and the other woman wasn’t.’

  ‘I don’t think anything is meant to be. I think things just happen.’

  ‘Certain things could go either way, yes, but I think there are things which are supposed to happen, for one reason or another. The Antarctic is one of them.’

  After Luke left she went back to reading the newspaper online: gun warfare on the streets of south London, ten people dead in a month. Migrants from Mauritania thrown to the sharks by their traffickers, a hijack attempt on an airliner in Russia by Muslim separatists. Two pages in the science/ environment section were given to oil prospecting in the Arctic; since the summer sea ice had retreated sufficiently to allow exploration nearly ten years before, Russia had erected offshore platforms, just beyond the boundary of the ice. Seismic ships and temporary drilling platforms sucked oil from the Lemonsov ridge. In the International Court in the Hague, Russia, the United States and Canada were in dispute over territorial rights to the Northwest Passage: it was a new Cold War; the newspapers had dubbed it the Ice War.