‘We put him on a bench in the naturalists’ room …’
And instantly we had done it Paul went and leaned his brow against the wall. Stigworth sat moaning with a frostbitten hand and chafed it furiously against his chest far inside his polar clothing.
Nikolai was keening by the door. Only I – and I don’t know why – watched Alec work with Victor. First he felt Victor’s temples, then wrestled with the frozen gauntlets, seeking a wrist pulse. His attempt to close the eyelids failed since they were frozen to the eyeballs.
He touched Victor’s bloated and frozen tongue and realized that, even if it were thawed, it would not fit properly back in the mouth again. Then, unbuttoning the iced wind-proofs from around the neck, he put his fingers towards Victor’s carotid and saw, before he touched the cold flesh, what I also could see – the various purple bruises of strangulation on the throat. Alec stared at me a second, pulled the windproof collar back into place so that the marks were not so visible and asked me alone to help him carry Victor through our quarters, manoeuvring his stiffness around the end of the table, then into the sailors’ quarters and so through into the workshop. I held Victor upright while Alec cleared a bench of hammers and chisels. When that was done, we placed the corpse on the bench.
‘There’s no one else to ask,’ he said, ‘so would you mind getting some blubber and lighting the stove here?’
The temperature in the workshop, you see, was probably close on freezing, but the room had an unused blubber stove which, if lit, would give out enough heat for the thawing of Victor’s body.
I went out of the workshop to the space beside the men’s latrines where frozen blubber was heaped. Men like Mulroy and Wallace flensed it away from the meat of any seal they caught, cut it in blocks and stacked it here where, of course, it froze. Every day sailors took a supply through to the stables for Mead to use in the stove there to keep the ponies warm.
I loaded myself with four blocks, enough – I thought – to warm Victor’s corpse, and brought them into the workshop. Alec had already covered the body with a blanket. ‘It’s from his own bunk,’ he said. I could dimly hear the explosion of a flare in the blizzard outside. Stigworth or Paul must be doing that duty, pointing the flare pistol southward over the hut, so that the flare exploded in the blizzard above our heads.
I put the blocks of blubber in the perforated bin at the top of the stove. As they melted they would give off an unpleasant fatty smell inappropriate to respect for the dead, so I covered the bin with its steel lid. Next I opened the slide beneath the bin and lit the small oil burner inside the stove. I closed the slide. What would happen now was that the burner would melt a little of the blubber, the blubber oil would drip through the bin perforations and feed the flames which would melt more blubber still. And so a heavy sooty warmth would grow in the workshop.
‘Thank you,’ said Alec. He took a chair and began filling his pipe.
‘Aren’t you shocked?’ I asked him. I thought the pipe was indecent.
He put it on the floor, near his feet, and put both hands on his knees. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Tony.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. A sweet narcotic fug of blubber-heat was already growing in the room. ‘Go ahead,’ I said, pointing to the pipe at his feet.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. What if you get us both a nip of brandy.’
‘Very well.’
‘But first, Anthony, could I ask you not to speculate? About Victor, I mean.’
‘Do I look like a gossip?’
‘Of course not.’
I went into our quarters and poured us a half-tumbler each from the brandy bottle. In the doorway near the darkroom and the porch beyond the naturalists’ room, returning searchers were arriving and questioning and talking of the blizzard. Paul was sitting silent but thoughtful at the table, which Stigworth was serenely preparing for supper.
When I took the brandy back to the workshop, Alec raised his glass towards me. ‘To reticence,’ he said solemnly.
At the dinner table later, Stewart had announced Victor’s death and had even proposed aloud that it might have followed a heart seizure. Yet the obvious signs, he had said, were of head injury and exposure. God rest his soul, said Sir Eugene in conclusion.
With such guidance, I could now only be what Alec had suggested – reticent. I felt I risked bringing on a final chaos if I said, ‘The Owner – the Chief – Sir Eugene is lying into his soup.’
So as Barry pestered, I gave my colourless answers.
At last he kept silent, knowing he’d pressed me too much.
‘You said you had a reason to ask,’ I suggested.
‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
‘It’s that Henneker was a thorough man. In his field he was a damn sight more thorough than I am in mine. I can’t – in fact, I don’t believe – he’d let himself die that silly way.’
I thought that was a stupid reason, but didn’t say so. I said what Alec had already said. ‘That sort of speculation is very dangerous.’
‘Lives have a unity,’ he said. People then did believe death was man’s last work and bore the mark of the man.
He patted my wrist. ‘You ought to have a hot drink and fall asleep early,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry. For nagging you, I mean.’
He went and found a novel and sat by the stove reading it. I sat alone and the longer I sat the better I came to like Barry’s thesis. There is a Graham Greene short story about a man who is killed by a pig that falls from a balcony in Naples. Why? Because he is the kind of man of whom falling pigs take advantage. The story is actually about the son of the man, who is exactly the sort of person to be ridiculously orphaned. But Victor wasn’t the sort of man on whom pigs fall. I knew that. Victor’s death had the stature of an assassination.
I raised my head. Alec stood beside me. His pipe was unashamedly fuming between his lips. ‘Have you got a moment for the Leader, Tony?’
I stood up and followed him. We went into Sir Eugene’s little alcove, and Alec rearranged the curtain so that we were unseen from outside. Sir Eugene sat side on to his table. He wore his stained white sweater and was frowning at some papers. When he saw me he put his head to one side as if I could immediately give him crucial information.
‘Sit on the bed,’ he told me. I did so, arranging my legs either side of the scarred leather suitcase which protruded from under the bed-frame. Peter Sullivan at one time or another took a photograph of Sir Eugene working as he was now, frowning over papers against the background of books, bed and tattered luggage. Lady Stewart loved the photograph so much that that one – not the heroic, open-air shots of Sir Eugene be-furred, be-skied, visionary in the polar glare – was the one she hung in her living-room from 1913 till her death in 1952.
‘I’m not going,’ Sir Eugene announced, ‘to make you take an oath or anything ridiculous. But we are concerned about rumours being started …’
I said I understood.
‘I’ve asked AB Stigworth not to gossip,’ Alec told me dolefully, as if he’d been forced to suspend all civil liberties.
‘He had a frost-bitten hand,’ I said. ‘That seemed to preoccupy him.’
‘Quite. And Paul was in a condition of shock.’
‘And as for Nikolai,’ concluded Sir Eugene, seemingly reading from some notes in front of him, ‘he appears to have been hysterical. Nor is his English adequate for spreading rumours.’
With a little shudder, he turned the notepaper over.
‘Cause of death!’ My aggression took even me by surprise. ‘What was the cause of death?’
Sir Eugene made a little affirmative grunt and inclined his head farther.
Alec said, ‘First he was hit. There’s a lineal fracture here.’ He patted the back of his own head delicately. ‘Then he was strangled. You saw the bruising around the trachea and carotid. In addition, there was the blistering of the face and the freezing of the limbs.’
‘We can’t tell these things to everyone,’ Si
r Eugene said. ‘It would throw everything into doubt. Trust. The manners of men. The expeditionary purpose.’ He began dismantling and inspecting the bore of his pipe. I have noticed the annoying obsession with pipe cleanliness in other men at times of bereavement and crisis.
‘The temptation,’ he went on, ‘is to pretend, not just to others but to ourselves, that it was an accident of climate. Only ourselves and the person responsible would know we were lying. But pretending is a mental trick I can’t quite manage.’
I was thinking of Barry and his questions and the absurdity of Barry breaking a brother’s skull and choking him with big bruising thumbs, putting an onus of investigation and punishment not on some impassive outside authority but on the people of the hut. I thought of Waldo and Kittery and Paul and Quincy. It was all ridiculous.
Sir Eugene picked up further notepaper and read the time-table of Victor’s afternoon. Victor had done the two o’clock reading and left the results in the meteorology hut. Then he spent a short time watching Paul embalm the skua. (So Paul had mentioned aloud at the dinner table that night.) Perhaps he’d rested and read more Holbrooke. Then, towards half past three, Rev. Brian Quincy went looking for him and found him in the latrines. The Rev. Quincy and his friend Hoosick had made a new parasite discovery and Brian considered it of sufficient news value to inform Victor about it. Victor promised to come and see Quincy and Hoosick as soon as he was finished in the latrines. But he had not kept the promise. Instead, dressing fully, he’d gone out for a walk in the blizzard; and had met somebody. ‘With what results we now know,’ Sir Eugene concluded.
We sat silent a while. The blizzard wail had such intimidating resonances.
Sir Eugene murmured, ‘Alec has a suggestion that may save the sanity of all of us.’
‘Yes,’ Alec began instantly. ‘Last autumn three men reported seeing a human figure in McMurdo Sound. Harry Kittery was first. He said he was working on the Barne Glacier, sinking a core for an ice sample. He looked up and saw a man standing on a moraine ridge two hundred yards away. He called to PO Henson to look but when Henson did so the man was gone. Next Barry Fields claimed to have seen a man at Hut Point. The distance involved was half a mile, which is no great distance in this atmosphere. Barry said the man seemed to be clubbing a seal at the edge of the tide crack.’
‘I hastened,’ Sir Eugene confessed, ‘to label it an illusion. The Forbes-Chalmers effect. It seemed to me no human could occupy Antarctica long on a solitary basis. I didn’t believe it to be biologically possible, and I certainly considered it wasn’t – what will I say? – emotionally possible. Now that this has happened I am tempted … merely tempted … to revise my ideas.’
Alec continued, as if on a cue, to whip up an outline, an acceptable silhouette.
‘Even after the Leader had given the phenomenon that name, PO Percy Mulroy claimed to have seen a man walking across the lower slopes of Erebus. It was from a distance of at least a mile and the weather was deteriorating, but Percy certainly believed – and believes still – in the man’s reality.’ Alec began hammering the palm of his hand gently with his own pipe bowl. For a second, he bit his lower lip. ‘I saw the man too. It was just like the time Harry Kittery saw him. We were at the Adelie penguin rookery half a mile down the coast. I had Paul Gabriel with me and PO Bertram Wallace. Wallace was catching the birds – he has a gift for it, his father was a falconer you know, not that falcons and penguins have much in common. Wallace would hold the Adelies while Paul put a numbered tag on their ankles and I took note of the number on a sheet of paper. We want to see if the numbered penguins come back to the same rookery next spring for their mating. Anyhow, I looked up while Wallace was chasing some penguin chick and the man was only a hundred yards away on a rise. I couldn’t see him in detail because the light was behind him. I could tell he’d run if I shouted, so I hissed at the other two, but by the time they looked he was gone. I … I didn’t make much of it because it’s not one of the purposes of the expedition to find Antarctic Crusoes, and in any case the light in this country does perform tricks, not subtle ones either. But that’s four of us who thought we saw a man. I think now we must have.’
‘I pray,’ said Sir Eugene, priming him, ‘that you must have.’
‘Of the men counted as dead on Holbrooke’s expedition, only the bodies of Forbes and Chalmers weren’t found. As you may know, Forbes and Chalmers started on a journey from Holbrooke’s hut farther down this coast for the Taylor Glacier. It’s a contracting glacier on the other side of McMurdo Sound and the valley it leaves as it contracts is dry – it doesn’t fill with snow, no one knows why. It is one of those Antarctic puzzles. Anyhow, Forbes and Chalmers began the journey in autumn. It happened that the autumn that year was one of ceaseless blizzards and Forbes and Chalmers neither returned nor were they found. Later Holbrooke was pilloried for negligence and delay, for not supplying them adequately. But they could have disappeared no matter how well they were equipped, given the weather. If, however, there is a man – other than ourselves – in McMurdo Sound, it must be Forbes or Chalmers.’
Sir Eugene murmured, ‘The Forbes-Chalmers effect is therefore well-named.’
I had noticed before that the relationship between Sir Eugene and Alec was a perfect king-chancellor one. Sir Eugene made the pronouncements and Alec did all the annotating. As he immediately began to do again.
‘Last February some of us visited Holbrooke’s hut. I noticed two things that surprised me. For example, Holbrooke says in his journal that when the relief ship turned up in February of 1909 the expedition was down to one crate of cocoa, a hundred and twenty pounds of biscuit, ten pounds of butter, twenty-five pounds of rice, eighty pounds of pemmican. Enough to keep twenty-five men alive for ten days. He says that the members of the expedition were so delighted to see the ship that they left all the food behind as a sort of tithe to the fates that had saved them. I was surprised to find no supplies in the hut. But I found something written on the wall. It said John Forbes, Dead in Christ, 1908. Large lettering. Done in charcoal. It … well, it didn’t look like the sort of thing Holbrooke would have wanted on his walls.’
‘Too accusatory,’ said Sir Eugene, ‘for Holbrooke’s taste. He didn’t want to be reminded of his dead. He still resents it if he’s questioned …’
I could see that Alec believed heartily in this surviving man who wrote on walls and took and ate the tithe Holbrooke had left for the gods. But at the same time I sensed Sir Eugene encouraged this belief only as a mental therapy for Alec and me, to keep us sane. The way an atheist father wants his daughters to believe in God on the grounds that the belief will make them behave more chastely.
Alec, however, was now deep in his thesis.
‘My theory, therefore, is that Victor – who is a newspaperman of the modern style – somehow made contact with Forbes-Chalmers and was to meet him again today at a certain time. That Victor, in spite of the blizzard, skied out this afternoon in case Forbes-Chalmers (we don’t know which one of them it is, though the inscription at Holbrooke’s hut indicates Chalmers), in case he kept the appointment. After all, a powerful journalistic motive would have been at work in Victor. An appointment of that nature would be the only sane reason for going out this afternoon. Discovering Forbes or Chalmers would have been a journalistic tour-de-force he may not have wished to share with the expedition. My theory then is that Forbes-Chalmers must have repented, for some mad reason, of meeting Victor and killed him to protect a manner of life which must be barbarous and painful yet, in Forbes-Chalmers’s mind, superior to meeting us or returning to the world.’
We all three sat silent for a while, relishing for a second Alec’s hypothesis that we were whole again, the Cape Frye community. That the cancer was interior. But I think Sir Eugene, like myself, wondered why anyone would set and, more still, keep an appointment in the midst of a Beaufort Scale II blizzard.
Sir Eugene studied my face a while. ‘You understand,’ he said, ‘the necessity of the lies at th
e dinner table? Death from exposure, following an accidental head injury, and so on? If I tell them Victor was killed by Forbes-Chalmers, a theory I can’t accept totally myself, then it will raise the parallel possibility that he was killed by one of them. Lies are a risk but I hope I’ll be forgiven. You know and Alec knows and I know that Victor was murdered. As a result, our heads are spinning, we are dazed, we don’t know what to believe. If all the people knew the cause of Victor’s death, the confusion – the stupefaction – would grow tenfold, possibly by the square of ten. Where would we go to hide from each other, to be safe from each other? What doors could we lock, what authorities could be called in? I won’t admit to them how Victor died. It is information that would make us barbarians.’
I felt a rush of panic at being elected to this inner committee of three. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why plague me with the truth?’
Because you already know it, they told me. Why not Paul Gabriel? I asked further. Paul Gabriel’s view of Victor’s injuries had been confused by shock and nausea. Besides, Sir Eugene told me, Alec had spoken to him and made sure. Paul’s apparent confusion was real.
Alec had spoken to him … for Sir Eugene wasn’t confident of his ability to talk to men directly. He was happier making a speech, his eyes travelling from man to man, taking in the collective not the individual face.
Alec Dryden picked up a piece of paper. ‘We find that of all the expeditionary members, only Waldo, yourself and myself were in the living area the entire afternoon. Waldo and you and I – we didn’t even visit the latrines.’
‘Good for you,’ Sir Eugene murmured with a brief private smile. He suffered from a condition called tenesmus. It was a cruel form of constipation which Webster’s defines as ‘a feeling of urgent need to defecate or urinate, with a straining but unsuccessful attempt to do so.’
Alec had taken up a further sheet of paper. ‘I have a crude list of other people’s movements. It’s not something we can ask directly – where were you, so-and-so, when Victor was killed? – but men have naturally tended to say what they were doing when Victor was dying. They’re tantalized, you see, by the thought of how easily they could have dropped what they were at and gone and found him.’