Victim of the Aurora Page 5

  I went to the door of the laboratory, looking for Quincy. I saw Kittery first, but I knew he had no grievance. He had to stay around McMurdo all summer, studying the Barne Glacier and the glaciers across the sound. Goodman was in the corner, grinding geological specimens on a stone table. His fingers were slick like a potter’s with the clays and the rock he was working on. I didn’t speak to him in case he too felt hurt, in case he painfully suspected that anti-Semitism was in operation, even in this far place.

  I went through into the weather-room, where John Troy was writing up records, and then into the biology lab. Quincy and Byram Hoosick, the American, were identifying a parasite they had taken from the gut of an Antarctic cod. Hoosick, the extent of whose decadence the night before had been lemonade and peanut brittle, looked up at me grinning like a farmboy in love. Quietly, in their little compartment, they had found a previously unknown parasite. It was something they managed to do about once a week.

  I went to lunch depressed. I had been working badly for the last two hours on water-colour sketches for a large painting of the aurora. It seems everyone else at table was a little jaded and subdued, and I speculated on the reason. Maybe it was still last night’s boozing, maybe it was the news that the final élite had been chosen, the ones to stand at the Pole, and that therefore, in a way, that most spectacular area of the expedition was closed off now from the rest of us.

  John Troy stood up after soup. There was no cat-calling as when he’d announced his new conical nose protector.

  ‘Gentlemen, because of the imminence of the blizzard, the ponies will not be exercised this afternoon.’

  There was no cheering. Perhaps by then we all wanted a pony walk as a therapy for our sense of mid-winter anticlimax.

  People drifted from table early. By two o’clock only Hoosick and Quincy were still there, holding some biological conference.

  ‘… blood sample from the fish …’ said Quincy.

  ‘… saline composition …’ said Hoosick.

  Ridiculously I wanted to sleep – sleep was a suitable refuge from my bad art. My easel was only a yard from my bunk. I sat heavily on the stool and stared at the last sketch. The real aurora pulsated continuously. How to get the pulsations in. As I considered the question I saw Henneker hauling on his windproofs and lighting a lantern for the two o’clock reading. He passed me, opened the door to the naturalist’s hut. That was the last I remember seeing of him.

  All at once the afternoon changed for me.

  I got my formal art training as a scholarship student at an academy in Paris called the Evraire. My landscape instructor told me, ‘Monsieur Piers, you are a barbarian. Train yourself with water colours to be less of a barbarian. If you make love the way you fling paint, no woman would want you.’

  I had tried for so long and so well to restrain my tendency to large barbarous gestures that now I had managed to paint the aurora as a mere colour profile. I had not conveyed its movement, its arrogance or barbarity.

  I began to paint again, as wildly as I could with water colours, the throbbing undulations, the vast electric shards of colour. Only once or twice did I listen for a second to the blizzard wail or hear men carrying the news around the hut that the wind had grown to force 12.

  The Reverend Brian Quincy put his hand on my shoulder a little after 4.30. ‘Could you join us, Tony?’ he asked.

  I turned and saw everyone, including the sailors, gathered around the table in the middle of the hut, all except Waldo, who was still sleeping off his catatonia. They looked dismal, like members of a kangaroo court. I was alarmed that they had convened under cover of my artistic absorption.

  I followed Quincy. Stewart was the only one seated. Flanked by large men whose names I knew, yet who suddenly seemed to be strangers, he looked up at me. ‘Have you seen Victor? Victor Henneker?’

  My life was about to be subsumed by a murderous event. But I didn’t understand that when I answered.

  ‘No. I saw him go out at two.’

  John Troy seemed petulant. ‘You must have seen him since two!’ he insisted.

  I shrugged and gestured towards the easel. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, John,’ I said.

  Stewart said, ‘I want you all to put on finnesköe and windproofs. The wind has levelled at force 6, very fierce. I want no one, no one, to suffer frost-bite. Dr Dryden will direct the search from this hut. You are to report to him at this table within sixty seconds.’

  For a minute the hut was full of the strange sounds of flexing windproofs as everyone dressed, whispering like monks when they spoke at all. As Paul was about to cover his head up I saw his hands arrested on either side of the fur-lined hood. His eyes glazed.

  ‘If he’s been gone since two o’clock …’ He had a concealed dread of what the cold could do. Once, in May, he had been lost on the sea ice during a sudden blizzard. He’d had no compass and had trudged ten degrees off course, reaching a little ice-bound islet called Middleton Island and mistaking it for the coast line near our hut. Struck by the sudden suspicion that he might have a compass after all in a pocket inside his windproofs, he took his glove off to search for it. He found nothing, but his hand was frost-bitten and useless now, so that he could not get the frozen mitten back on it. He pulled snow about him and slept for a while and opened his eyes once, having already lost interest in consciousness and life, to see a gap in the blizzard. And in the gap a flare rose into the sky. Therefore he had come home. But the hand was frozen and covered with elephantine blisters in which the fluid had frozen. It hung by his side heavy with the ice of his own subcutaneous liquids. Sullivan took a photograph of that hand and I believe it is still used as a cautionary picture on scientists and sailors being briefed for Antarctica. Somehow, with salves and dressings, Alec Dryden quickly mended the hand, but the memory stayed with Paul. That ice can render a body monstrous in the same manner as fire.

  ‘Two and a half hours,’ he said, thinking of Henneker.

  At the next bunk, which he and Henneker shared, Brian Quincy overheard. ‘But he hasn’t been gone for two and a half hours.’ Squinting up at us, Quincy buckled up his finnesköe, the furred polar boots from Finland. ‘I saw him an hour ago.’

  We asked for no explanations or chronology. There wasn’t time. But the idea that Victor had left the hut an hour before we went to look for him became the reasonable doctrine amongst us.

  AB Stigworth had placed two dozen storm lanterns on the table and was lighting them. It was strange to see him in his blizzard gear, the thin sober head rising from the furry hood.

  Dryden had made a diagram for the search and written names down in various sectors. He told us how the flares would be fired and the hour by which we were all to return in any case. I think it was twenty to six, but am not sure. He told us to take our personal compasses. I remember some of the unexpected groupings of men. Alexandrei and Henson were to search together, and Kittery and Stewart. Stigworth the sweeper and Nikolai. Beck and Mead. Paul and I were to work to the south of the hut.

  We each took our lanterns and left, the northward searchers by way of the naturalist-room, the southward through the porch near Peter Sullivan’s darkroom.

  We milled in the porch a while covering our noses and mouths, all but our eyes. We southward searchers had to walk into the blizzard. Though my mouth was now muffled by a swath of windproof cloth, I mumbled towards Paul, suggesting we might tell Dryden we wanted to search to the north. Paul understood, that his glasses would ice within seconds and be speckled with drift snow.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You’ll be as blind as me in this weather.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply you were blind,’ I told him, tired of his readiness to be insulted.

  But I could see by his eyes he was grinning. ‘We’ll be just as good south as north. We can lean into the wind.’

  Barry Fields opened the outer door. Stepping out into the blizzard, he yelled some warning or expletive which was carried away north. He vanished as absolutely as a
parachutist disappears from the door of a plane.

  Paul and I stepped out crouching, in case the wind blew us on our backs or tore the lanterns from our fists. The blizzard, being a medium unto itself, forced on us the gait of Sumo wrestlers. I had again the usual blizzard feeling – that my senses had battened down in a little haven under my ribs, that I was remote from my hand which numbly held the lantern. Snow spun quickly in the small patches of night we lit. Our shoulders were against the back outside walls of Mead’s stables, made of bales of hay set between bracing uprights of timber and carapaced iron-hard with ice provided by the climate.

  There was no comfort to us in that wall. So, bent, we turned south and stood for a while wondering if we could successfully take a further step. My locked knee-joints jiggled under the wind’s attack, and I could feel the small vacuum at my back which my body and the wind made between them.

  While we walked, I thought of nothing. Not of art nor women. Nor of the wonder that all the snow butting me and biting my eyes was not fresh-fallen but snow from another place, perhaps from a ridge farther inland than any of us had been or a glacier where Harry Kittery had never set a bamboo flag. There was numbness and no wonders for me in that wind, that whirl.

  In ten minutes we reached the weather screen, turned our backs to the south wind and got down on our haunches. It was of course like talking beneath a waterfall or across a canyon.

  ‘If he’s in the snow asleep,’ I roared at Paul, ‘we won’t find him by going in a straight line.’

  ‘No,’ Paul agreed at full throat.

  ‘I suggest we go back on our tracks but sideways.’ I made zig-zag motions of my gloved hand to indicate a lateral search of the area we had been given. ‘I mean, against this wind, he wouldn’t have gone on past the weather screen here.’

  Paul yelled in reply. ‘I think a little further. Say four hundred yards. And then back and forth, back and forth.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  But he insisted.

  We continued, some seven yards apart and, as agreed, looking at each other and at the snow between us and on both sides. My brain became a small numb cube, all protein but no spark.

  It jumped and reared however when Paul’s light vanished. I looked to the rear. Paul was hunched a yard behind me. I let the wind blow me towards him and to my knees as well. It was pleasant to give in to it even in small ways.

  He had found boot-tracks, in spite of his iced spectacles. We knelt together, viewing them. They crossed our own. Flakes settled on them but were blown away. That was the way of wind, snow, ice in that place. A bootprint or a skitrack compacted the surface snow so that later snow-drift found it too slippery to settle there. I remember that later during the expedition Peter Sullivan took a photograph of month-old bootprints standing up six inches above a wind-eroded ice-surface, like little buttes. Originally they would have been sharp and indented like the boot-tracks we were watching by the light of two storm lanterns.

  We followed them and found Henneker, though not easily, since snow had fallen at his back and mounded him over. He lay facing the Pole. We had to walk round him and squat with our backsides to the south. His open eyes were very bulbous in the light of the lanterns. His tongue stuck out. It was black, a frightful excrescence, hopelessly ice-bitten. The panels of the face – cheeks, forehead, jaws – were bloated and already blackening.

  Paul ripped the covering from his own mouth and vomited in the snow. I had felt nothing yet, my senses were still all in hiding and I saw the corpse and the problem distantly.

  ‘We have to carry him,’ I called.

  I saw Paul button up his mouth and shake his head. I felt anger. It spiked my throat.

  ‘Paul, damn it!’ I screamed. ‘Take his legs!’

  He obeyed me. It was obvious the body had already stiffened in the cold. Somehow, as we were blown north carrying Victor, we retained our lanterns. Possibly we were too numb to understand they were still in our hands. I was shocked and useless and dropped the shoulders twice. Paul seemed patient with me.

  Some yards back we stumbled on Stigworth, the sweeper, and Nikolai, the dog handler. Under Stigworth’s eyes were frozen tears.

  ‘The bastard won’t move, sir,’ he yelled at me. ‘He’s hexed.’

  Nikolai sat in the drift snow, shivering, his eyes closed.

  ‘It’s all right. We’ve found Mr Henneker.’

  I must admit that the class-consciousness of the day required me to call our weird load ‘Mr Henneker’.

  ‘Oh good, sir.’ Stigworth screamed, ‘This bloody Roosian, he hates the dark, sir. He just sits there. You’d think, sir, in bloody Roosia, they’d be used to the dark.’

  He kicked Nikolai, who opened his eyes, saw us and the corpse we carried, and began screaming.

  That was the way we took Henneker back to the hut. Paul, Stigworth and I hauling him and a demented Russian wailing in our wake.

  3

  Sir Eugene Stewart had an alcove of his own. It was formed on three sides by a tall bookshelf, a plywood partition against which his bed stood, and the wall of the hut. The fourth side was made by a curtain hung from a rod. The curtain was rarely closed, but even when it was pulled back you could still only see in there from the corner where Dryden and Troy slept.

  In this way Sir Eugene expressed both his accessibility and his desire for privacy.

  On the night of Henneker’s death the curtain was pulled firmly across, making a private room out of the alcove. Stewart had Alec Dryden in there, conferring with him. The rest of us were also finding it hard to digest Victor’s death. We sat at the table, reading or writing, or else working numbly in our appropriate places. Paul, for example, had gone back to work on the skua, Hoosick wrote up the day’s discovery in the biology-room, Peter Sullivan developed copies of last night’s photograph in the darkroom. Quincy sat in a hard chair by his bunk, the bunk he had shared with Henneker. We presumed he was praying or mourning meditatively, in the manner of a clergyman, but he was the sort of man who would have thought it in bad taste to do it on his knees around people who were working.

  I was still too bemused to be any use with a brush. When Waldo woke at eight I took him to the table and fed him tea and the last of Walter O’Reilly’s bread for that day. I was in a state of mind that made me wonder if there would be bread tomorrow. It was clear to me that Victor Henneker had been treated violently and not survived the treatment. Therefore all the bonds and shared duties that made our life possible were under question, if not ruptured. It mightn’t be long before everyone in the hut understood that, before things fell apart, the stove went out, the blankets iced, the drinking water froze over.

  ‘Waldo,’ I said, ‘Something happened while you were asleep.’

  ‘A blizzard came up,’ he said. He was embarrassed about that. That the weather should change radically while he was unconscious. ‘Poor John Troy. All that extra work.’

  ‘It wasn’t just the blizzard. This afternoon Victor Henneker went out without telling anyone. We can’t ask him why. But he fell and hit his head and, I’m afraid, he’d died of exposure before he could be found.’

  Waldo looked at his hands, clenching the fingers as if he could read in the arrangement of the knuckles a clearer account of the death. He said at last, ‘You say, of exposure?’

  ‘Or of the head injury, or of both.’ I had seen it all and his incredulity annoyed me. ‘Does it matter, Waldo?’

  Waldo did not say. He still wore the contrite look that he always had following his fits.

  ‘He … he wasn’t reading the weather screens?’

  ‘No. No, he did the two o’clock reading but came back safe from it. John Troy and PO Mulroy are doing the eight o’clock now. But it was late this afternoon Victor went out again, nothing to do with readings, nothing to do with anything. As I say, we can’t ask him.’

  After a while, Waldo said, ‘Death by a freak. Poor Victor. You’d think in a great … enterprise like this, you wouldn’t die in t
hat way. A bump on the head. Thanks for telling me, Tony.’ He stood up, wavering a little. ‘I think I’d better go and see what’s happened in my office today. While I was … while I was sick.’

  He was usually a wry young man who made jokes quietly, out of the corner of his mouth. But guilt over his fits left him wooden.

  At the end of the table the two geologists, Fields and Goodman, had been playing a dispirited game of chess. Usually they contested noisily, making speeches about their strategies, calling in other men to watch them make crucial moves. ‘See what I’m doing to this colonial Gentile,’ Goodman would say in invitation. ‘Look at this, I’ve got his bishop and check,’ Fields would announce. ‘Sheep farmer,’ Goodman would say. ‘Gefilte merchant,’ Fields would reply. They were the only two who mentioned Goodman’s jewishness openly. They did it without any awkwardness. Tonight, though, there were no rantings or exclamations over the chessboard. Goodman beat Fields easily but seemed to get little joy from the triumph. Barry murmured his congratulations and drifted down the table to the place where Waldo had left me.

  ‘You’re shocked,’ he suggested gently. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Do you mind talking? About finding him and so on?’

  ‘Well …’ Alec Dryden had asked me not to. To pretend shock and reluctance even if I didn’t feel it. Of course I felt it.

  Barry blinked, staring directly at my eyes. I wanted to laugh. He had the over-solemnity, over-frankness, of a child. ‘I mean, you found him. Did you really think he’d hit his head? Just that? Sorry if this is painful. But what did he look like?’

  I couldn’t frame words. ‘Yes. I don’t know. Blisters. His face was blistered. I don’t know.’ I wanted my non-knowing-ness to sound like the last word.

  ‘You and Paul and the sweeper brought him back. Did Alec look closely at him? Listen, you’ve got to bloody forgive me. I’ve got reasons for asking.’