When I found what I had done, I had no joy but stood dazed and unbuttoned. Only when I began to feel in my genitals the sting that precedes frost-bite did I remember where I was.
Quincy found me in the dark and passed me and crawled into the tent. When I followed I found him already breaking out the biscuit for breakfast. I should have taken over, since he had cooked last night. But I was too dispirited to offer.
‘Barry’s over in the ice hole,’ Quincy told me. ‘He went over there at five this morning. He got the feeling that the man would come back. Of course, it hasn’t happened.’
‘It isn’t going to happen,’ I said a little brutally. ‘The man couldn’t leave us alone. Yet he can’t live with us.’
‘You think he’s given himself up to the blizzard?’ Quincy asked. The niceness of the image annoyed me.
‘If you want to put it that way.’
Quincy stared at me but uttered none of those parsonical exclamations that you’d expect of clergymen when the question of suicide arises. I was grateful for that.
‘Brian?’ I asked. ‘That day, the day Victor just walked out in the blizzard. You said you went looking for him about mid-afternoon. And found him in the latrines.’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t open the door and actually see him?’
‘No. A man’s entitled to his privacy.’
I thought of Petty Officer Henson. A full-blown Edwardian crime, something as opulent and amply limbed as an Edwardian demi-mondaine, would incorporate elements such as PO Henson. The number of times I had found him amongst the sailors impersonating Sir Eugene or Alec or Troy. His part in the organism of the crime was no established datum. Yet a scientist can define the nature of a certain acid in the nucleus of a life cell, say, by his constant failure to discover it by test. Similarly I could define Henson’s part by its apparent absence. It would not be the first intuitive leap I had made in my confused study of the crime, but it was the first correct one.
‘One of the petty officers – Henson. He’s a mimic and a practical joker. He could have been in the officers’ latrines that day. I mean, it’s exactly the sort of joke he loves to play. And if he’s sitting there enjoying his little escapade and someone comes and calls Victor, he might decide to take the joke further and answer in Victor’s name. Especially if Warren Mead isn’t in the stables and he can scamper back to the sailors’ quarters as soon as you turn away.’
‘No. It was Victor. It was exactly Victor. The use of the phrase “dear boy”. “I’ll be right along, dear boy. Hang on to your curious fish for me.” That sort of thing. No one can imitate it.’
‘You just did. Though Henson is better.’
‘It was Victor!’ Quincy insisted. My grin must have been the annoying grin of impenetrable certainty. Henson had answered Quincy. For Victor had already left the hut, and at a reasonable time, before the blizzard was more than a rising wind. ‘Henson, of course, has no sense of guilt about playing this little joke on you. He has no idea how much rational weight Alec and Sir Eugene place on your conference with Victor in the latrines. Sir Eugene doesn’t tell the sailors these things. They’re innocents to him, and knowledge will spoil them.’
I then asked the question which would rout the Rev. Quincy. ‘Brian, a few nights ago. Did I speak with you in the latrines?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
But I laughed, he was so mistaken.
‘Brian, this is serious. Please answer me truthfully.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you mention trolling to me?’
‘The other night you spoke to me in the latrines, and I told you I might be trolling the next day.’
Quincy had just put an axe to the roots of my theorem. I should have been pleased, since the original deduction had stunned me to the point when I began to suffer frostbite of the body. Yet I still believed in the tree of my reasoning; Quincy’s refusal to make his contribution to it had only convinced me of its intricacy, its speciality.
By the time he had the breakfast stew bubbling I had explained to myself exactly how he had been misled. Fuelled by the small perverse elation of this further step of reason, I crawled out into the storm to fetch Barry for breakfast.
Once outside I remained on my hands and knees. Crawling, it was harder to move in a semicircle, easier to keep straight and find the ice embankment. Easier then to find the hole and Barry.
I knew that it was no use talking further to Quincy. I must get back home to Cape Frye and talk to Henson. I could think of Cape Frye as home now. The killer was known and was now merely a pitiable item of the household.
Inside the hole, Barry had discovered Forbes-Chalmers’s library. None of the books had inscriptions in them except for a rubber stamp-mark saying that they were provided by the Library Fund Committee of the British South Polar Plateau Expedition. They had entertained the world’s ultimate castaway for nearly four years. There was a Bible, Rider Haggard’s She, Kipling’s Jungle Stories, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Deerstalker of Fenimore Cooper, Murders at Brostwick Abbey by Bernard Higgins, The St Meryn Cricket Club Murders by E. C. Halsey, Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898–1899 by Frederick A. Cook, and The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of Erebus and Terror in the years 1839–1843, Volumes 1 and 2, by Joseph Dalton Hooker. There was no book of geological survey notes and no geological reference book. There were no navigational or geological instruments or tools.
Perhaps Forbes-Chalmers had dumped them all somewhere when his new life began. To be a hermit is probably an all-consuming occupation.
The blizzard lasted a full two days. Barry spent most of the time in Forbes-Chalmers’s ice-house, accustoming himself to the disappearance of the man. There was, as a result, more room in the tent for Quincy and me. We read and talked and were more or less comfortable.
When the wind dropped it did it slowly. But by five o’clock on our third afternoon you could see the ice embankment dimly from the tent door. Immediately the three of us did our duty and went out looking for Forbes-Chalmers. We travelled five yards apart from each other and moved inland. Our guide was a small hand-compass specially adjusted to take account of our closeness to the South Magnetic Pole. We encountered, after a mile, some broken ice-ridges which not even Forbes-Chalmers would have tried to travel in a blizzard. We searched northwards two miles along the foreshores, calling all the time. We searched south as far as the defile where Forbes-Chalmers had made fools of us. The cold was, of course, unspeakable, especially in that three-mile beat southwards, facing the wind.
So we were staggering when we found Forbes-Chalmers’s cape again. We lay on sleeping bags waiting for our hoosh to cook and there was little conversation. Each man lost himself in an obsession over the savour of the cooking food. After the meal, Barry got ready to spend another night of eccentric vigil in the ice hole. Before he left he turned to us.
‘I was so bloody hungry tonight,’ he confessed. ‘I think I can understand cannibalism.’
‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ said Quincy.
‘But of course he’s right. That Forbes-Chalmers. You couldn’t go on living the same way afterwards.’
The next day we hiked fifteen miles, calling for the man in a variety of directions. The lack of an answer did not surprise me.
As Cape Frye came into sight that afternoon we could see also the shapes of men and ponies exercising each other on the ice of the sound. Closer to them, we could identify Mead in front, walking the convalescent mare, Tulip. Then Stewart with Larry, Alec with Shylock, Troy with Sally and so on. I noticed that Norman Coote led Igor, the brute who usually led me. It was good to see them, to come out of a great vacancy and find them at their daily routine.
One of them spotted us in the distance and waved, and passed the word along the line. The horse-walking stopped. Everyone stood still to count us and wonder why there weren’t four. Stewart hurried Larry back towards the shore to intercept us before we reached the hut.
Once he found out that Forbes-Chalmers had
vanished he turned to other questions. That was his nature, to pretend to be more interested in the periphery than the centre. As if his mother had told him it was bad manners ever to utter his disappointments.
He asked how fast the sled journey over the ice had been? How long we had spent searching yesterday and the distance covered? How tired we’d been? How far we’d walked and sledded today? How tired were we at the moment? Did we think the balance of fats and carbohydrates was correct? Did we think, if the blizzard had lasted a week, the sledding rations in the three-man pack would have been adequate for us to stay healthy and sled home? He kept at us and we answered him dully.
We had been gone a mere three and a half days but the refinements of the hut dazzled us as the Savoy might dazzle a farm-labourer. We sat for a long time with hot mugs of cocoa in our hands. The flesh of our palms gratefully took in the heat, while AB Stigworth, as a concession to our small winter journey, laid the table around us. If I hadn’t been surrounded by colleagues I would have groaned like someone sexually aroused as the heat of indoors took over my extremities and crept towards my core.
Despite the warm air and the warm food that followed, I spent two hours in the latrines that night. I went heavily clothed for comfort and carried a novel called The Courage of Captain Plum by James Oliver Curwood, and a pocketful of candle stubs. I kept a conversation going with every visitor. They were short and undemanding conversations since no one stayed in the cold latrines longer than they needed.
In this way I spoke with Mead and Goodman, with a drowsy Barry Fields, with Peter Sullivan, Hoosick, Norman Coote, Harry Kittery, and even with Sir Eugene. Close to eleven, when Captain Plum had ceased to entertain and I was beginning to doze, I knew by the opening and shutting of a door two stalls away that I had a late visitor.
‘Cold night,’ I called.
‘It certainly is,’ said Paul Gabriel.
‘Have you been busy the past few days?’
‘Moderately. Dr Dryden and I have been dissecting a seal.’
Dr Dryden? I let the latch loose on my door, crept to the occupied stall, dragged its door open. PO Henson was there, half-standing, his trousers round his knees. I told him to come out.
‘It’s just my hobby,’ he said, pulling his pants up. ‘Go easy on me, Mr Piers.’
‘Come with me, Ernie.’ He was chewing his lips, imagining how little Sir Eugene would laugh about a puckish sailor whose best joke was using the gentlemen’s latrines and conversing with them in their own voices.
I led him to the blubber stove in the stables and we sat on the boxes where Warren Mead and Alexandrei spent half their day.
‘The first thing, Ernie, Quincy doesn’t call Hoosick Mr Hoosick. He always calls him Byram. Paul Gabriel likewise calls Dr Dryden, Alec. The titles are just a front they put on when they’re with the sailors.’
‘I always started with first names,’ he said, defending his art from a critic. ‘But after a while it would sound so wrong I’d always go back to surnames. If it was a wrong move, I seemed to get away with it. People do seem to talk a bit stiffer when they’re in an outhouse.’
‘You can get in practice by calling me Tony.’
‘I did. The other night. Didn’t I?’
‘So you did.’
‘I like to do him,’ Henson admitted. ‘I like to do the Rev. Quincy.’
‘I believe you’re very good at me too, Ernie.’
‘Yes, Mr … Tony.’
This conversation, the performance advice I was giving PO Henson, might seem improbable to anyone born after 1940. But in those days people spent their entire lives stuck like flies in amber in a particular level of society and had no way of discovering how people in another class really spoke to each other or behaved privately. There were no movies to intimate these things, and the theatre and music hall dealt mainly in caricatures. So, what I was telling Ernie Henson, my next-door neighbour, was all news to him. Apparently even a twice-daily visit to the officers’ latrines hadn’t been an adequate education.
‘I must say you were good,’ I told him.
He tried to bite off his grin. ‘All the lads say that. They say I ought to go on the stage.’
‘You did Victor once. It was the day of Victor’s accident.’
But he shook his head. He wouldn’t do that to a man. He wouldn’t mock a man the day of his accident.
‘I understand it must be hard to remember all your individual triumphs. But it was the time Reverend Quincy came and said that he was about to do an interesting experiment with the blood of an Antarctic cod.’
‘I remember that. Oh yes. I remember. He said, are you there, Henneker? And I thought what the hell. “Yes, dear boy, I said. Yes, dear boy.”’
I did not want Henson to dwell on the indecency of imitating the voices of the fated.
‘And you must remember,’ I told him, ‘a special success you enjoyed four nights ago. When the Rev. Quincy came to the latrines and spoke to you.’
‘The lights went out and he said, “Oh lights out already.” And then I … well, I started doing you. He left after a while and the next one in was you. So I … I did the Reverend Quincy with you.’
‘A tour-de-force,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘It’s what the press will very likely say when you go professional, Ernie. It’s a polite way of saying bloody brilliant.’
‘Thank you, Mr Piers.’
‘Sleep tight, Ernie.’
‘Are you going to say anything to Sir Eugene?’
‘You’ll hear nothing, Ernie. Nothing. For all I care you can continue latrine-crashing.’
In the bunk area Victor had named the Cloisters, Paul Gabriel was already abed and reading a book entitled Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty by a New Haven Yankee called John William de Forest. It was said to be a classic of the American Civil War and traced a Louisiana girl’s rise to a Yankee rectitude of thought.
‘Enjoying it, Paul?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, without taking his eyes from the print. ‘If I’m not finished it the day after tomorrow, I must take it on the egg journey.’
He thought of the egg journey as a frontier. Once he was started on it he would be safe, Victor would be history and all culpability a historical question, like the question of blame for the death of Abraham Lincoln or Mary, Queen of Scots.
Weariness came down on me, indefinite but enervating. ‘I would like a long talk with you some time, Paul. But not tonight.’
‘Certainly,’ he said absently. He turned a page and a new chapter heading could be seen. It said: ‘Colonel Carter Makes an Astronomical Expedition with a Dangerous Fellow Traveller.’
‘Don’t forget,’ Paul muttered, deep in Colonel Carter’s dangerous expedition, ‘you have to sit over the blubber fire every day.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I’ve just been doing that.’
I considered him. The myopic assassin. I wondered how I could save him from suicide or execution. From his radical madness it was already too late to rescue him.
I presumed that Paul’s crime had arisen from some homosexual crisis involving Victor, even suspecting that Paul was the new companion of whom AB Mulroy had told us, the lover who didn’t need to have famous names explained to him.
Thinking that way, I went walking with Alec and Paul, a walk that was a toning exercise for our coming journey. If I abstracted from the question of Paul, I could almost have said I was strong, content and confident. That morning I had managed a successful water colour of the aurora. Men had crowded around my easel to admire it. They seemed to feel that now I had halfway expressed the inexpressible they would never be as awed and frightened again. It had been a week since I’d worked. I was glad to have the potency back.
Now, as we walked, I listened to Alec and Paul arguing about the ancient race of penguins. It was as soothing as when Barry talked geology. The towering mists of rock and penguin history imposed on me a calming sense of my context
, my ultimate paltriness. For the moment my ultimate paltriness was a comfort to me.
‘They were never birds of flight,’ Paul was saying. ‘I used to think they had been but the study of the latest work convinces me otherwise. Consider the case of those Argentinian geologists on the Palmer peninsula, who found the fossil of a sixty-million-year-old penguin tall as a man.’
‘Five and a half feet long in the taller instance,’ Alec said, correcting the poetic inexactitude of tall as a man. ‘Only four feet ten inches in the other.’
‘And in these fossils no indications of a structure appropriate to winged flight!’
‘Yet the flippers were more elongated, proportionate to the structure, than in the current forms of penguin.’
‘No indication of keel bones!’
‘But what if they’re in the embryos we find? Keel bones or wing quills in the embryo, which develop out by the time the chick is born?’
‘I suppose we must depend on this journey to put paid to all your speculations, Alec,’ said Paul dismissively.
Alec smiled at me and we walked in silence, except for the strange squeak of our boots on the snowed-up surface of the sound.
‘Sometimes,’ Alec said at last, ‘I pity the Emperors. In the spring, when the chicks are hatched, it’s like a battlefield at Cape Crozier. Sudden cold spells will kill the young. Petrels will drop down from the sky and rip open the infants’ stomachs to get to the fish inside. Parents who have lost a chick will try to pick up a stray one and, in the fight for possession, the chick is invariably trampled to death. It seemed to me that young cadavers were everywhere.’
Paul said nothing in reply to this. Alec possessed some ultimate authority – he had been to Cape Crozier one spring during Stewart’s first expedition. He had seen the chicks perhaps six weeks after they ceased being embryos and cracked their way out of their eggs.