Victim of the Aurora Read online

  At 8 a.m. I heard the men next door rousing and, soon after, a faint whinny from the stables as Alexandrei arrived to feed the ponies their morning hay. They slept standing all night, those ponies. The floor of the stable was too cold for them to lie on, but Warren Mead said they were comfortable and had a locking joint in their knees that took the weight off their hoofs. It was the way they slept in Siberia, said Mead, since the time they were foals.

  A little later I heard the dogs greet Nikolai. They occupied a slight incline to the north of the hut, most of them leashed to two thin cables. They too were from Siberia and were all post dogs used to deliver mail, or else the offspring of post dogs. When blizzards came they sat and let the dry snow cover them and, so insulated, slept the time away. When Nikolai came to them each morning with their frozen seal meat they applauded him madly. Some of their howling was like that of ordinary dogs, but they could also sing better than a coyote, and keen better than a wolf.

  Next I heard the thud of the men lifting slabs of snow, cut with coal shovels out of the ice embankment behind the hut, into the snow-burner.

  Every morning ‘the strongmen’ – the haulers and sledders like POs Mulroy, Wallace and Jones, had to melt down a day’s supply in a blubber-fed burner near the acetylene tanks. The water dripped slowly from the burner into a (somehow never full) tank in the galley area and from it Bernard Mulroy issued us our daily ration.

  At 8.30 I saw Eugene Stewart emerge from his curtained compartment and cross to the stove, rubbing his hands gently, like some old monk to whom even the cold is a gift. Stigworth the sweeper brought in two bowls of snow and put them on a table near the darkroom. Alec Dryden and Troy stood up naked and rubbed the snow all over their bodies. Their pale hindquarters glistened and quivered.

  This was a workday. I was in no mood for it. But I got up anyway. Everyone else in the line of five bunks on our side of the hut seemed stertorously asleep. They had only another few minutes to sleep off their drunks.

  I confess with embarrassment to what worried me. You have to understand that in those days the attitude to homosexuality was one of breathless abomination. ‘Sodomy was accursed,’ says a historian of the era, and the law and public opinion destroyed the sodomite. No homosexual should be let anywhere near children or public office. In 1908, the German Emperor had dismissed his oldest and closest friend, Philip von Eulenberg, because of a homosexual scandal.

  I was a child of my age and suffered from all its frantic prejudices.

  I was now afraid, that morning of June 23rd in Antarctica, that Henneker might be trying to seduce Paul Gabriel. I am embarrassed to have to relate the diffuse and ridiculous origins of this suspicion. But I must.

  The last port of call all those classic Antarctic expeditions made before they vanished into the ice was Lyttelton in the South Island of New Zealand. It was a beautiful little haven with high ridges above its bowl of harbour, and over the ridge and in the plain was the city of Christchurch.

  When we docked in Lyttelton all the best families of Christchurch vied to have us in their homes. Some of us wanted to be free agents and raise whatever hell those Southern cities offered. But Stewart insisted we take the invitations, and John Troy was delighted, because it meant a saving on stores.

  Paul Gabriel and I found ourselves guests in the home of a Christchurch wool merchant. He and his wife drank nothing at dinner and their three teenage daughters were not permitted to add anything to the conversation except requests for salt or Worcestershire sauce. The wool merchant spoke of ‘home’ – that is, England – so fervently that you wondered why he lived so far from it.

  His father had been a factory hand in Nottingham, and he delighted in passing on to us horror-stories of the Nottingham slums.

  ‘So in a way,’ said Paul, ‘Britain so deprived your forbears of a decent income that your father was forced to come to the South Pacific to find one?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said the merchant.

  He had once entertained a cousin of the Prince of Wales, he told us, and our names went on some honour roll of distinguished visitors from ‘home’ he kept in his billiard-room. Even Paul Gabriel, who was a pleasant boy and could suffer anyone gladly, thought the man was a bore.

  Late on our second afternoon there, Barry Fields arrived by cab, asked to see us, and was shown into a front parlour. Then we were fetched by a maid, who took us in to Barry and withdrew.

  ‘Hell,’ Barry said. ‘What is this? A bloody doll’s house?’

  ‘It’s worse,’ I told him. ‘It’s a morgue.’

  ‘Bloody colonials,’ he said.

  ‘You’re one yourself,’ said Paul.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m a socialist and have no country.’

  He always said that when he was cornered. In fact, he went into conservative politics in Australia before he was thirty-five years old.

  ‘The place I’m staying,’ he told us, ‘is very humane, a pretty wife, pretty daughters, their old man very liberal with the good things that come from bottles. And the son is a secret heller and had the good taste to give me the address of a first-rate seraglio. He says even the Governor-General of New Zealand uses it when he’s in town. I thought it would be only civilized to invite you two to visit the place with me.’

  At the end of this speech he flourished an imaginary rapier in the air, touched its tip to the top of his boot and bowed. It was an habitual gesture of his. As habitual as saying he was a socialist.

  I said, ‘I think we could look the place over.’

  I didn’t want to shock Paul Gabriel, who still had the look of a senior prefect. But the sight of the pretty women of Christchurch had aroused me. It was useless trying to seduce any of the girls we met socially. There wasn’t time, for seduction was a long business in those days. In any case, Stewart had asked us to behave. And why should a nice Christchurch girl give in to us anyhow, when we were about to go into the void?

  I was pleased to see Paul understood that in a funny way Field’s offer was a gesture of friendship. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean,’ said Barry, ‘if we don’t like it we can have a drink and leave.’

  We made some excuse to the wool merchant’s wife about having to attend a dinner and met Barry in the lounge of the Imperial Hotel. After one scotch each we caught a cab. It was a beautiful September evening, the beginning of the Southern spring, and the parklands in the centre of the city, each tree and every leaf, seemed delineated by the prismatic light, sometimes blue, sometimes a golden brown as sharp as the points of lances.

  We passed the cathedral where the parklands ended. Nowadays, in the square by the cathedral, stands a statue of Sir Eugene Stewart in polar gear. It was not, of course, there then, and we rolled through the square feeling kingly and tremulous. In a quiet street full of good houses, the cab horse halted as if he knew the particular gate. The cabman certainly did. When Barry paid him he winked and wished us a happy evening of it.

  A maid answered the door and showed us into a parlour. There were antimacassars and a picture of a stag, as well as portraits of Victoria and Albert and an engraving of Windsor Castle.

  ‘Are you sure it’s the right place,’ Paul Gabriel asked Barry.

  ‘No risk,’ said Barry. ‘This is window dressing.’

  At last the Madam, Mrs Bryant, came in. She was a small pretty woman of about forty-five. Barry said Mr Stevens had recommended us and had telephoned her to that effect.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You’re the brave gentlemen who are going to Antarctica.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘My house is yours. Please follow me.’

  She led us upstairs. The furnishings up there were sombre too. She opened a door on a small room where there was an ottoman, two easy chairs and a coffee table. As she told us to be seated a maid came in with a silver tray on which stood scotch and soda and three glasses.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Mrs Bryant, ‘some of my dear friends will join you soon. Dri
nk what you wish, but remember there is only one rule in my household. I never admit drunks and I will not tolerate any drunken assault on my friends. I ask you to be responsible with the scotch.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, piqued a little, and she left.

  Barry poured three scotches and passed them round. There were two doors into this waiting-room. One of them opened and through it came three pretty girls dressed in summer frocks as modestly as girls at tea parties. One had reddish hair, and Barry Fields held his hand out to her, saying, ‘Hello, my name’s Barry and I’m a Viking too.’ That also was one of his continuing statements: redheads were Vikings.

  A small dark girl sat beside me. ‘I’m Betty,’ she said. ‘You’re going to the South Pole, you poor fellow.’

  I had noticed that the people of Christchurch, like the people of London, used Antarctica and the South Pole as interchangeable terms. But I wasn’t going to argue with anything so intensely pretty. I took a second to glance at the girl who had landed at Paul Gabriel’s side. She was large. I smiled at the idea of his taking her in through his minus-vision lenses.

  Betty said, ‘Let me in on the joke.’

  ‘There’s no joke,’ I said. ‘I’m delighted to meet you, Betty.’

  We sat together for a while, nudging. I smelt her cologne and felt the pressure of her breasts on my upper arm. At some stage Barry Fields growled like a triumphant bear and took his fellow Viking out through the door. Betty asked me to come with her and we walked out. In a sober bedroom, she forced me back on her bed.

  At some delicious point of my arousal I heard a yowl from somewhere in the corridor of bedrooms. I tried to ignore both it and the sound of footsteps in the corridor, but Betty would not. She got up from the bed and went to enquire.

  Mrs Bryant was in the corridor. She said to me, ‘How dare you bring an inebriated friend into my house.’ Barry emerged from another door and she said the same to him. Paul Gabriel had been sick over the body of his large girl and Mrs Bryant said she would call the police, who were, of course and quite credibly, friends of hers.

  We dressed and went into the large girl’s room and dressed Paul. His eyes were distant amongst the stink of bile. As we helped him downstairs, Barry said, ‘Did you …?’

  ‘No. Did you?’

  ‘Oh hell!’

  A cab was passing the corner and, seeing us, its driver turned into the street to collect us. Paul Gabriel was still gasping and dry-retching and, once in the cab, he turned towards a corner, brought his knees up like a man with stomach cramps and became comatose.

  ‘I hope he’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘You mean, as regards health? Of course he’s all bloody right. He just caught it from Henneker.’

  ‘Caught what?’

  ‘They used to tell me when I was a kid. Half you bloody English are that way.’

  ‘What way do you mean?’

  ‘Henneker’s a closet queen. Haven’t you seen him going after young Bernard Mulroy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, that’s the trouble. You’re all so bloody busy separating the “gentlemen” from the “sailors”!’

  ‘A second ago, half of us had strange tendencies. Are all Australians as prejudiced as you?’

  ‘I’m a socialist. I have no bloody nationality. And I’m not so much a “gentleman” that the sailors don’t talk to me. Before we were over the Equator, PO Mulroy came to me and asked what he thought he ought to do about Henneker and his brother.’ He had grown less rabid now, recovering from the unconsummated relationship with his hired Viking. He said, ‘Of course, this is between us.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Barry’s information at once reminded me of a friend of mine who, when I told him Henneker was an expedition member, said, ‘You’ll want to guard your flanks. They say Henneker’s a regular at the Icarus Club.’ The Icarus Club was a notorious homosexual brothel in Piccadilly.

  I asked Barry, ‘Do you really mean Henneker and Bernard Mulroy were …?’

  ‘That’s dead-on what I mean, mate.’

  ‘In any case, it’s got nothing to do with Paul here.’

  Barry patted Paul on the back of the neck. ‘I suppose not. Poor old Paul.’ He leaned close to him and murmured, ‘What did you have for dinner, mate? Escargots?’

  When I got Paul back to the wool merchant’s they were waiting up for us. Paul was still dazed and in misery and I had to help him in. Our host’s suspicions coincided with Mrs Bryant’s. ‘What have you done to the poor fellow?’ the wool merchant demanded. It shows that both the righteous and the reprobate share the same moral prejudices.

  I helped Paul to bed. As I was leaving him he grabbed me by the arm and said, as if it explained everything, ‘My mother told me I was a child of love.’

  I knew his mother by her reputation. She was Thea Gabriel, a renowned danseuse and fore-runner of the Isadora Duncan breed. Like Isadora she hadn’t put much store on paternity and had given Paul her own name. I had never asked him if his father was, as London gossip said, Howard Middleton, a chocolate magnate, himself a sufferer from short-sightedness, who had built a mansion in Berkshire for Thea. (She had occupied it for two months.)

  I didn’t know what Paul meant by ‘a child of love’ or how it would help me when I went downstairs to face our hosts.

  But what I had heard of Henneker that night began to disturb me when, in the winter at Cape Frye, I saw him questioning Paul, or Paul laughing at his stories. It seemed that the evenings often ended with those two in conclave, and Henneker listened as avidly to Paul’s stories of Eton or Magdalen as Paul to Henneker’s tales of the beau monde.

  The trouble was Paul was innocent. His scandalous and ethereally worldly mother had worked as strenuously as any church-going mama to keep her boy uninformed about evil.

  When the ‘gentlemen’s’ rising hour of 9 a.m. came that morning of June 23rd nearly sixty-five years ago, Lieutenant John Troy had to go amongst the bunks bullying my colleagues to rise. On our side of the hut, Kittery and I were up, but all the other occupants of those five double bunks, named the Cloisters by Henneker in honour of the Rev. Quincy, had to be shaken by the shoulders and bullied upright. I heard Beck moaning and someone farted thunderously, probably the Rev. Brian Quincy who was afflicted with hyper-active bowels, a crucifixion for a man of such painful sensibilities. He sometimes shame-facedly blamed the condition of his bowels on the foul food he’d been served in his first curacy in rural Yorkshire.

  In the upper bunk Paul sat up suddenly, too suddenly for a man with a hangover. He looked wanly at me.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.

  ‘Today,’ he said, looking at his hands, ‘I’m going to begin the stuffing and mounting of a skua gull. It is the first flying bird I’ve attempted.’

  ‘Good luck with it,’ I told him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I saw Henneker pulling on a woollen cap for his visit to the latrines. It could be cold out there in the mornings. As he passed Paul’s upper bunk he stopped a moment and looked up tentatively towards the boy (I automatically call Paul ‘the boy’, though he was only two years younger than myself). Paul was still contemplating without joy the task of the skua or something more secret. It was Henneker’s eyes and mine which met.

  ‘Spry after the Saturnalia?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes. You, Victor?’

  ‘I feel as if a division of the Sudan Camel Corps have camped in my mouth. But I can perform a mime of health and industry. I think.’

  I can remember still his tall movements as he made for the stable door, the polar crapper, walking like a man on his way to his tailor’s. In so far as he represented the shallowness of his age, he was totally unsuitable for an expedition. But he represented its toughness as well. He was a hauler, a skier, a marcher. We liked his stories even though they sometimes turned vicious. Dryden and Hoosick shyly pretended he didn’t exist, but he was popular with some of the more unlikely and innocent men, the Rev. Brian Quincy an
d Paul Gabriel.

  Within ten minutes we were all at the table, eating one of Walter O’Reilly’s fortifying breakfasts. Beck, after one mouthful, cried, ‘Oh God, why do you torment your good friend Par-axel this way?’

  Just to make talk, someone asked Alec Dryden what the aurora had been like last night. ‘Poor,’ he said. ‘Rather bleached. A weird green arch whose highest point didn’t coincide with the meridian, about 285 degrees south-south-west. Some green wreaths about the mountains. But so thin they were practically streamers.’ You never asked Alec Dryden a question without getting a highly explicit answer.

  Kittery, who was a puckish little man with glasses, told us, ‘You’ll be happy to hear the weather’s deteriorating. No afternoon pony walks.’

  Unless there was a blizzard on, each of us had a pony to exercise after lunch. All the hung-over at table wanted to know more about the barometric pressure and the low pressure system that was swirling down from the Pole. They didn’t care to take some bouncy pony out on to the ice at the end of a jarring rope.

  ‘Waldo,’ they began calling, seeking the expert word. We all noticed then that Waldo Warwick wasn’t at the table. John Troy stood on a chair so that he could tell whether Waldo was still in the upper bunk where he slept.

  ‘He’s there, Harry,’ he told Kittery.

  Kittery flinched. In the midst of his great task, which was to document the formation and behaviour of ice in glaciers, on the ice shelf, and on the waters of the sound, he kept forgetting prosaic details, such as fully rousing his bunk-mate or reporting him ill. His work and even the jokes he made at table were directed at showing Eugene Stewart that he could be trusted, that he really was a polar Praetorian. For some reason Stewart persisted in giving the young physicist something less than an open-handed greeting. In his journal at this stage the leader praised Dryden and Troy and Mead, and even Waldo Warwick and myself, without any wavers. But of Kittery he was writing, ‘I do not know if he is yet aware of the size of the task which faces him. There is no doubt he is very talented but if he is not successful in his work it will be because he is confused about his objectives and does not understand that he was employed to study all the superficial ice of our part of Western Antarctica and, if possible, ice in movement in the depths of shelves and glaciers. He can be forgetful …’