by Betty Neels
She vaguely remembered shaking the fat man’s hand. Presumably he was the boss; he looked mild and absent-minded and probably had a remarkable brain. He smiled at her now and came to take her arm. ‘Lead on, Freddy. Annis, you can have ten minutes to make your beautiful self even more beautiful and then you shall have supper, such as it is.’
The hut, which looked bare and unwelcoming from the outside, was a surprise. Its furniture was comfortable and the covers and cushions were brightly coloured. Two rooms led from the small living room, small too, but her bed looked comfortable and there was a good sized cupboard and a dressing table. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but she was agreeably surprised now. It wasn’t for a few days that she discovered that she and Freddy had been moved into the hut shared by the boss and the doctor, who had taken up quarters in one of the other huts, which while comfortable, had no living room and was more cramped. She unpacked a few things, did her hair and her face and with Freddy beside her, crossed the bare rocky ground between them and a larger hut which, he explained, was their communal centre, where they ate and played cards, and played records and spent their leisure. ‘We go climbing too,’ he added, ‘and fishing; it’s pretty quiet in the winter, though.’
The understatement of the year, thought Annis. It seemed pretty quiet now, with nothing but the seabirds calling and the gentle wash of the icy water against the rock. ‘Holidays?’ she asked.
‘Oh, rather, everyone goes to Norway in turn— there’s a plane or they can go by the Coastal Express. I’ll go in a couple of months, though; I’ll be finished by then. Jake’s going too—he’s got a practice in Holland, you know.’
‘No, I didn’t know,’ said Annis dryly as they went into the hut.
The men had certainly done their best. There was a long table running down the middle of the room and although there were no flowers, there were lighted candles, rather dimmed by the midnight sun but nevertheless festive. She was sat at the centre of the table, with the boss on one side and the senior engineer on the other. The doctor, she was vaguely annoyed to find, was sitting as far away as possible.
The meal was, perforce, out of tins and whoever had opened them had been lavish with the can-opener—there was more than enough for everyone and a good deal over, and Annis found it a little pathetic the way they asked her every few minutes if the food was good. She praised it lavishly, hoping her inside wouldn’t rebel against the strange mixture which it was sampling. Everyone must have had a hand in preparing the meal; she worked her way through soup, cod, covered with a rich sauce which seemed to contain everything in the cookery book, a variety of vegetables, and rounded off with a steamed pudding. Over coffee they explained that they were due to fetch their stores very shortly, when she would find a much larger selection of groceries. They looked at her hopefully as they said it and she hoped that Freddy hadn’t made her out to be up to Cordon Bleu standard.
They had had drinks first and wine with their meal, although she suspected that the men would have preferred beer. She was touched with their welcome, though, and resolved privately to feed them well as well as nurse them, although it seemed unlikely that there would be much of that; a tougher bunch of men she had yet to meet.
‘Where did your cook come from?’ she asked the boss.
‘Oslo—Sven’s sister…’he nodded across the table towards a fair young man who didn’t look more than twenty. ‘She was a nurse too, and a typist. Do you type, Annis?’
She was glad that she could tell him that yes, she could type. ‘Not very well,’ she explained, ‘but I’m a bit rusty at it.’ Her pretty mouth curved in a smile. ‘Is there an awful lot to do?’
‘No, no—just once or twice a month, reports and so on, very simple.’
‘You’re not English?’ she asked him. ‘Although you speak it perfectly.’
‘Finnish—we are a very mixed bunch, mostly Norwegians though, with a couple of Swedes and of course Jake, who is Dutch.’
‘Yes, someone told me. What a blessing everyone speaks English, because I can’t understand a word of Norwegian or Finnish or Dutch—I don’t think I’d know them if I heard them.’
He laughed comfortably. ‘We shall all teach you a few words and you will get quite expert.’
The dinner party broke up presently, and Annis said goodnight to everyone, thanked them prettily for her welcome and dinner and made for her hut, secretly appalled at the doctor’s cool: ‘Don’t forget you are on duty tomorrow morning at seven o’clock, Annis. The shifts change over at eight so that the men going on duty breakfast at seven-thirty and the men coming off at eight o’clock.’
She thanked him coldly for the information. He was just the irritating kind of man to remind one of one’s duty…
The kitchen, she discovered the next morning, was remarkably up-to-date. Being a new broom she intended to sweep clean, so she was ten minutes early, making coffee, setting the table with what she hoped the men ate for breakfast. There was a huge side of bacon hanging in the larder too, but she was relieved to see that a large quantity had already been sliced. She found a frying pan as large as a football field and started frying, helped half way through by Freddy who was to go on the day shift but hadn’t hurried from his bed.
‘Six rashers each,’ he told her. ‘Just put the bread on the table—there’s orange juice too.’
On the whole, Annis felt that she had acquitted herself rather well. The ten men who presently sat down to their breakfast did justice to it, complimented her on her cooking and hurried away to their various stations, all except the doctor, who had another cup of coffee, asked her rather carelessly if she had slept well, handed her a timetable of the day’s work so that she knew where she was and then requested her presence in the surgery at nine o’clock. ‘One of the engineers slipped early this morning and cut his leg on the rock—nothing serious, but we shall need to tidy it up a bit.’
Having said which, he took himself off, leaving her to clear the debris and get the next lot of bacon into the pan; presumably she ate with the men coming off duty. It was an agreeable surprise when two men came into the kitchen and told her that they were doing the washing up. ‘We take it in turns,’ they explained. ‘There’ll be two more for the next batch.’
They grinned at her cheerfully and eyed her with interest, while she, happily unaware of their glances, bent over the stove, unaware of the pretty picture she made. She had sensibly packed slacks and a variety of tops, and she was wearing a short-sleeved shirt over blue slacks now, enveloping the whole in a large apron she had found behind the door, a legacy from the previous cook and nurse. She hadn’t bothered much with her hair, either, only brushed it out and tied it back in a ponytail. She looked considerably less than her twenty-seven years and pretty enough to eat.
The men coming off duty were tired, but they ate just as heartily as the first lot had. Annis dealt with gigantic appetites, ate her own meal and leaving two more volunteers to wash up, made her way to the surgery, a hut standing a little apart from the rest, a roomy place with a well-equipped surgery, a two-bedded ward, a portable operating table and a cupboard well stocked with instruments. The doctor was already there, bending over a man on the table. Without turning round he said: ‘Ah, there you are—there’s a white gown in that closet beside the door.’ And as she put it on: ‘Bring me that covered kidney dish, will you?’
Unfriendly to the point of being terse, she considered, and while she stood beside him, handing things, swabbing the leg, cutting gut, she had time to take a good look at him. Her first impression had been right; he was enormous and rather more heavily built than she had thought and his high-bridged nose and heavy-lidded eyes made him look ill-tempered, although that didn’t seem likely, for he seemed universally popular. She wasn’t sure if she was going to like him; he hadn’t done so yet, but probably he was going to throw his weight about. He looked, she considered, more like a ruthless high-powered executive than a doctor. But within half an hour she found herself eating her w
ords. The doctor, while not attempting to charm her in any way, was placidly good-natured, not saying much but responding to his patient’s remarks with goodhumoured patience. The injury wasn’t too severe; a day or two resting it and he could return to his work in the hut at the far end of the tongue of rock. Annis was to dress it daily after the doctor had seen it. The doctor glanced at her as he spoke and smiled and she found herself smiling back at him.
She discovered within two days that the doctor was the silent one of the team. He never joined in any of the arguments or made any but the mildest of comments on any subject, yet she noticed that the men turned to him when a deciding opinion was needed, and when the argument became too fierce it was he who damped it down with a few quiet words. She wondered what he did with his day until Freddy told her that he was carrying out a series of experiments, monitoring hearts and lungs after each man came off duty as well as taking samples of everything vegetable which was living; and that wasn’t much. Annis had been there for several days before she found her first flower, a minute buttercup-like plant clinging to the rock in the warm sunshine. She took care not to disturb it; it took decades for seeds to germinate in the unfriendly climate which existed for nine months of the year; each small flower was a precious thing. She was so delighted with her find that she told the doctor while she was clearing up the surgery after he had treated a boil on a Norwegian’s neck, and he had told her that there were many more if she looked carefully. She waited for him to suggest that they might go together in their leisure to look for them, but in this she was disappointed. He remained silent, and she, not a vain girl but aware that she was attractive, wondered what he didn’t like about her. He took almost no notice of her beyond greeting her civilly when they encountered each other about the station, making conversation when circumstances demanded it of him, and sitting at the far end of the table at meals. In a word, she told herself crossly, he was avoiding her.
And somehow this was all the more annoying when every other man there sought her out whenever she was free—trips on the sea in one of the powerful motorboats kept at the station; careful climbing expeditions to look for flowers, and when it was warm, long sessions by the sea with binoculars watching the birds and looking for seals.
The boss had taken her on a tour within a few days of her arrival; round the various huts, along to the big radio hut where the men sat at their instruments. She had only a dim idea what they were doing and she was quick to see that no one was going to tell her anyway, although she was shown how messages were sent and how they got their electricity and the wonderful view they had of the mountains around them as well as the open sea. Cruising ships passed from time to time, she was told, on their way to the Ice Barrier and Ny Aalesund, but they never stopped at the station; for one thing, although the water was deep, the pier was only a rickety erection, liable to fall down at any minute.
‘Why doesn’t someone mend it, then?’ asked Annis practically. She didn’t wait for an answer because the Coastal Express was just in sight. It wasn’t calling that day, it seemed; supplies had been brought back when she had been fetched from Tromso and as someone would be going to Ny Aalesund very shortly, the letters could be fetched from there. They trundled back to the main camp in the jeep and she went to get on with the dinner.
Her days were well filled; she was busy but not overworked and mostly the days were clear, with blue skies. There was always a boat available and someone to go with her, and when it was bad weather with ink-black clouds pressing on to the mountain tops and a cold, sullen sea, there were plenty of partners for a game of chess or backgammon. Letters to write too, a great many of them, to be taken to Ny Aalesund, the weekly film to enjoy, and books to read. She spent a good deal of time with Freddy, listening with sympathy to his account of his last love affair; he fell in and out of love so often and so briefly that she was hard put to it to remember the girl’s name. She didn’t think he was brokenhearted this time, though. He remembered, however, after a long monologue about girls and the last one in particular, to ask her if she were happy.
‘Yes, very,’ she told him, and was surprised to find that it was true. She was happy—there was very little nursing, the odd cut hand and septic finger, bruises and abrasions, but there was plenty to keep her occupied each day. She could work as she wished, no one interfered and she took her free time more or less when she liked. Only the daily surgery was strictly on time each day and although the doctor had never said a word, she made sure that she was punctual.
It was towards the end of the week when they were at supper one evening that the doctor mentioned casually that he had seen a small herd of seals further along the coast, and added: ‘If you’re interested, Annis, I’ll show you how to reach them—it’s not far if we cut across the base of the mountains. Only wear your boots.’
The invitation was given so casually that she wasn’t sure if he had meant it, but when supper was finished and she had cleared the table and put everything to rights, she found him waiting, sitting on an upturned box outside the hut. It was already late evening, but there would be no night, of course; the sun shone, a rich gold, above the horizon and would stay like that until day began once more.
‘Boots,’ he reminded her, and she went to her hut and obediently pulled on the strong footwear she had been given on her arrival. She picked up her anorak too, for the weather could change with disconcerting suddenness and she was wearing only a cotton blouse and slacks.
They went for the most part in silence. For one thing, it was quite hard work scrambling over the bare rock and for another it hardly seemed the right background for light conversation. Once or twice they stopped while her companion pointed out a seabird or a particularly beautiful ice floe, its pale green turned to gold by the sun, creaking and cracking as it went on its way south, but for the greater part of the time he went steadily ahead, turning to give her a hand over a particularly tricky bit.
They were cutting across a curve in the coastline, somewhere Annis hadn’t been yet, for on her boat trips they almost always went in the other direction. Now they rounded the last massive cliff and she caught her breath.
The mountains stretched in front of them, sweeping down to the sea, their snow-capped tops contrasting with the dark grey of their slopes and the dark blue of the sea. Their line was broken directly before them, though, and a fjord, its beginnings lost in a great glacier a mile or more away, cut them in two. Its water was smooth and still and dark, for the mountains held back the sun, and the barren shore, thick with ice, looked grandly desolate. It seemed incredible to Annis that anything should want to live there, but the doctor had been right. The seals were packed snugly side by side along the side of the fjord, with the giant male seals sitting on ice floes, guarding them. They looked fatherly and a little pompous, but they never took their eyes away from the mother seals and their pups.
‘We can get closer, they’re not afraid of us,’ said the doctor quietly, and helped her across a ridge of rock.
‘How can anyone bear to kill them?’ demanded Annis fiercely. ‘Look, their eyes are just like ours and the babies look just like our babies.’
Her companion’s firm mouth twitched slightly but he answered her gravely: ‘Indeed they do, and I deplore their killing, but here they seem safe, although one wonders how they can live so contentedly in this barren land.’
‘Yes, but it’s beautiful too, although it frightens me. I had no idea—I don’t know what I expected, but I felt sick with fright when I got here. It’s not like anything else…’ She felt she wasn’t explaining very well, but he seemed to understand her.
‘It’s still our world,’ he reminded her. ‘It’s hard to equate it with Piccadilly Circus or the Dam Square in Amsterdam, but it’s utter peace and quiet and awe-inspiring nature at her most magnificent.’
She was surprised into saying: ‘Oh, do you feel like that about it, too? Only I couldn’t have put it as well as you have.’
She took a careless step and sli
pped and his hand grasped her arm, and then without any hesitation at all, he caught her close and kissed her. It wasn’t at all the kind of kiss Arthur had been in the habit of giving her; he took his time over it and she thought confusedly that she was enjoying it very much.
His pleasantly friendly: ‘You’re such a beautiful girl, Annis—that and the midnight sun’s magic…’ brought her back with a sickening bump to a prosaic world again. Commendably, she managed to say coolly:
‘It is magic, isn’t it, and I wouldn’t have missed it for all the world. I’d like to come here in winter, though…’
He had thrown a great arm round her shoulders and she felt a thrill of pleasure.
‘Would you indeed?’ He turned his head to study her face. ‘Yes, I do believe you mean that. I came up here a couple of years ago for a few weeks and it’s quite extraordinary, more so because the people who live here take it for granted.’
‘But you live in Holland?’ She had never asked him any questions before; probably he would snub her politely, but he didn’t.
‘Oh, yes—I’ve a practice in a small country town; Goes—it’s near Middelburg, if you know where that is.’
‘Well, of course I do,’ she protested indignantly, ‘though I’ve never been to Holland.’
She felt a strong urge to ask him if he were married, if he had children and a family. She wanted to know more about him, but although he had kissed her with some warmth, his manner was as casual as it always had been and she was sensible enough to know that kissing a girl when there wasn’t another female to be seen for miles was a perfectly normal thing for a man to do. She stifled a sigh and asked: ‘What exactly does everyone do here? Freddy doesn’t make it very clear.’
He threw her a quick look. ‘It’s a radio station, you knew that? We send weather reports and relay shipping news and there’s an early warning system…’
‘Oh, I see… I suppose I’m not supposed to be too curious?’