A Victim of the Aurora (15 page)

He put his hand out for the book. ‘I know, it's all very painful.'

I gave him the book. He read the opening page. Then the story of Captain Jeffrey. He sighed. ‘He has the details exactly right,' he muttered. After a while he began to chuckle. ‘It's no use being overwhelmed by mutual shame.'

‘The missing entry …?'

He told me without a pause, ‘Waldo Warwick's entry is the missing entry. You can see for yourself. In which case the deleter, the expurgator, performed an incomplete service.'

Then he turned back to the first page, turned it to me to indicate that it alone was the one that radically distressed him.
Sir Eugene Stewart – See later entry re: Lady Stewart
. He ripped that one page out and tore it into many neat squares and into twice as many again and dropped them all behind the work-bench on which the lathe stood. That work-bench would never leave Antarctica. It is still there in the Cape Frye hut and, no doubt, the diced page of Victor's journal still lies behind it, pristine in the air of the ice-desert.

Alec returned the book to me. It was a touching gesture of trust, of fearlessness.

‘Why was it put there?' he wondered, even before the
Journalist's Yearbook
, now further edited by himself, was back in my hands. ‘Why was it put where it was put, beside the Holbrooke, which everyone reads? Not by Waldo, though. It wasn't put there by poor old Waldo. I mean, you wouldn't steal it, take out only the entry that damns you and then put it back on the shelf. Would you?'

‘Is catatonia associated with madness?' I asked.

Alec coughed and lowered his eyes. I saw the white scalp beneath the parted and impeccably brushed brown hair. His neatness seemed a sign that he wasn't yet unmanned like me.

‘Don't be prejudiced,' he advised me.

It seemed he thought I was unfair to catatonics. He beckoned to me and I followed him into the meteorology room where Waldo was still working. When we entered the room, we found him sitting at a desk making pencil marks on a sheet of hydrography paper which he had just taken from one of his self-recording instruments. On the paper were the lines that told how the marginal humidity of that polar desert had risen and fallen in the past ten days, and Waldo's pencil marks pointed to the patterns of moisture. Perhaps in the Libyan desert, perhaps in the Atacama or the Rubal Kah'li, some heat-crazed colleague of Waldo's recorded humidity readings akin to those Waldo now took. ‘We're desert dwellers,' he would sometimes tell us, smiling broadly.

Bent over the roll of paper, Waldo resembled a pre-Raphaelite knight, intent, sensitive, unsoiled. A William Morris apparition. I began to feel nervous.

He indicated with a wave of his pencil that we were welcome, but could we wait a little while? He finished work on the roll of paper, glancing at us occasionally. As we waited, we could hear AB Stigworth setting the table in the main quarters.

‘Gentlemen,' he said solemnly, looking straight at us. The bowed head and oblique look, which normally persisted for days after his fits, were not in evidence today.

Alec asked him had he heard any rumours of a journal. Details of peccadilloes etc.

Waldo smiled a little, as if the idea made Victor more endearing. ‘I'd heard gossip,' he admitted.

‘He had something to tell about all of us.'

Waldo said, ‘He was that sort of man. He didn't intend any harm.'

‘I can't agree with that,' I said.

‘The journal has turned up,' Alec announced.

I frowned at him. I wanted the journal, especially the section concerning Anthea Hurley, to remain secret or, at the very most, within the knowledge of our little committee. Only after a while did I notice that Waldo himself was suffering, his eyes blanking and then seeming to travel inwards, his pallor more intense than was decent even for a man who suffered fits and had lived two months under the moon. If you'd told me then that he would live till eighty-three, become burly and jovial, hold a chair at Stanford and go through three wives, I wouldn't have believed you.

Yet I was about to have an intimation of how he would achieve this. If pain and grief became too much for him he was capable of dumping them entirely upon another creature and could walk away lightly from the new sufferer he had, so to speak, infected.

Alec said, ‘When Tony found the journal, there were entries for every member of the officers' mess, except for you and Sir Eugene Stewart. Both those entries had been torn out. Sit down again if you like, Waldo. In fact it would be a good idea.'

He held Waldo's elbow as Waldo sat again at his desk. ‘This is painful, I know.'

‘What are you expecting to hear, Alec?' Waldo muttered. ‘What
are
you expecting?'

‘Well,' said Alec. ‘Well … you know, Waldo. I … I saw the two of you once.'

‘Oh Holy Jesus!' said Waldo.

Alec took Waldo's wrist as if to soothe his pulse. ‘Come now,' he murmured. ‘Come now.' And, after a pause, ‘Lady Stewart and yourself. You had a liaison.' I never understood why he should say it with me there, or even why I was there at all. Was it for some therapeutic reason, or was he honouring the committee of which I was a limp and dazed limb? Any pernicious reason is out of the question. He always consciously forbade himself to act for pernicious reasons.

‘I know that because of the Stewarts' cook. She's an Irish woman called Miss Maggie Tierney and she must be close on seventy years of age. She knew, I don't understand how.'

‘I don't understand how,' Waldo repeated. ‘Lady Stewart would never meet me anywhere at all public. She never came to my place in case my neighbours noticed her, in case my manservant noticed. She used to tell me,
don't worry about Maggie, she doesn't know about physical passion.'

Alec said, ‘Miss Tierney came to see me while I was staying at the Cadogan Arms. She wanted me to speak to Sir Eugene or to Lady Stewart herself. Since it's confession time, I don't mind confessing that I've always been awed by Lady Stewart and I certainly didn't want to distress Sir Eugene, who was fund-raising up and down the country.

‘She used to say to me,' Waldo reminisced, ‘that I was an innocent particle. Thrown this way and that by some electric tension between herself and Sir Eugene and the continent of Antarctica.'

‘It's a way of looking at the situation,' said Alec, coughing. ‘But of course it begs the question. In any case, the next time I visited Sir Eugene at his place …'

‘Oakley Gardens,' said Waldo, uttering the address with nostalgia as well as abhorrence.

‘… I went down to the kitchen and asked Miss Tierney if it was still necessary to talk to either of the Stewarts. She said no, the phase had passed.'

‘I …
met
with her five times. I entered and left by the mews and no one saw me that I knew of. Yet you've known, Alec. All this time.'

Alec tried to de-charge the memory, to rid it of its Oedipal reverberations. He didn't want Waldo to display his symptoms again. ‘It's always the way,' he said. ‘I had an uncle who visited a mistress three times a week for thirty years yet no one knew till his will was read. It's we occasional sinners who have all the bad luck.'

I admired Alec for the use of that personal pronoun, for the decency of listing himself in the brotherhood of adulterers to which Waldo and I belonged. Here was a man who had loved one woman only, who saw the imminence of God in the aurora, a compulsive father to all other men. When his private journal was published in 1958 it was a song of passion for his wife, of mystical sexuality, a statement of wholeness. It did not sell well in that soulless decade, but it proved to my satisfaction that he had never had to lie to reception clerks or creep past resident cooks.

‘It began,' Waldo said, ‘at my insistence. It was broken off against my insistence.'

Alec nodded, accepting this statement as a gallantry. There was a silence, during which my mind progressed as far as an image of Victor's Mr Dawe working on the Irish housekeeper. No doubt Alec considered questions of more point.

Waldo was recovering nicely from the brief discomfort of having to talk about sleeping with Lady Stewart. He had stood up again and even, like a busy man temporarily distracted, moved a meteorology log from the centre of the desk to a more suitable place to his left. ‘I spoke to Sir Eugene after lunch today.'

‘You spoke to him?'

‘I told him …'

Alec covered his mouth with his hand. It was his turn to be pallid. ‘Waldo, were you trying to kill him?'

But Waldo couldn't admit this. Confessing had done him so much good. He couldn't believe it hadn't done Sir Eugene good also. ‘No. I was … I suppose I was … trying to do right by the two of us.'

‘Yourself and Lady Stewart?'

‘Myself and Sir Eugene,' he said, shaking his head, cancelling Lady Stewart. I wondered how she could have wanted this child. I suppose I was also asking why, if she wanted a child, she didn't choose me that night at Brenton's.

Waldo coughed sharply. ‘I was rather low after yesterday's fit. I'm not supposed to have them. It's inappropriate. It's inconvenient for others. I
haven't
had any since I was thirteen. I had no idea they would recur. As for Sir Eugene, he
ought
to know, he'll be happier for knowing. I realize he can't speak to Lady Stewart for fifteen months yet, perhaps eighteen. Perhaps that's a good thing. In any case, I couldn't go on meeting him every day, and not telling him.'

The next words spoken were the kind that surfaced in some of the psychiatric melodramas I designed in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s. It shows you that one generation's solemnities become the melodrama of the succeeding generation and the comedy of the next.

‘You saw the fits,' Alec suggested, ‘as arising from a sense of culpability? Of culpability unconfessed?'

‘Oh yes,' admitted Waldo. ‘Oh yes, there's no doubt.'

He began to tell us how they had started in the first place. He was ten years old and his parents had taken him and his brother and sister to the coast of Dorset, in the area of Portland Bill. There is a sort of cratered bay there, almost a lake, but the sea entered it through a narrow mouth. Waldo and his tough twelve-year-old brother Simon had hiked to this strange bay, called Devil's Hole, and hired a rowing-boat. As schoolboys will, they tossed a coin to see who would take the boat out first. Waldo was allowed to toss and catch the coin but when he had it in his hand he did something that was contrary to their code, something he had nonetheless been trying to do whenever he tossed but which his brother always spotted. He turned the coin over twice instead of the prescribed once. His brother did not notice this time, and Waldo won the first half-hour in the boat. His brother waited on the shingle for his turn. After the agreed period, Waldo brought the boat in. He was not as comfortable as he pretended because there was a surf running, as there often was in Devil's Hole. Waldo was happy to be on the wet shingle again and to hold the bucking rowing-boat as Simon climbed in. A thunder cloud covered the sun, the surf got imperceptibly higher. After the boat capsized Simon should have been able to swim ashore, but locals, who always know these things but don't say them until after the event, said that some sort of circular rip occasionally set up in the Hole, that it was futile swimming against it as Simon probably tried to do. Yes, the rip would have taken him out through the gap. Waldo's fits began soon after, and he knew why … if he hadn't broken the code by turning the coin twice, he would have had the second turn and the rip would have taken him, not Simon.

At thirteen he got the idea that the fits would cease if he confessed to any authority. He told the school doctor, who went to the trouble of getting the popular school chaplain to inform Waldo on the Deity's behalf that Waldo was not culpable for a silly thing like the turn of a coin.

It was ridiculous, said Waldo now, a man of twenty-six … but he was following the same cure as he followed when he was thirteen. Without blinking, he asked us to believe he had considered suicide, but that would have left the expedition without a meteorologist.

We were understandably silent for a good ten seconds after Waldo had finished his recital. Alec spoke first.

‘After you told him … how was he?'

Waldo flinched. ‘He said of course he was devastated. He was very honest with me. He said that for the moment he didn't quite know how he could go on managing the expedition. But he suspected that in a little while he would have found a place in his system for what I'd told him, it would become mere baggage.'

‘Which it never really can be, Waldo. Can it?'

I remembered Sir Eugene's confrontation with Barry that afternoon, the lack of his normal primacy, and Barry's uneasy belligerence.

‘He thanked me,' said Waldo, ‘for my honesty. That's too kind of him. But I believed his ignorance would have … Would have affected the whole enterprise.'

We thought about this, and reached our separate conclusions but did not voice them.

‘I have a favour to ask you,' Alec told Waldo. ‘I would like you to pass the word around. That the journal has been found. That Sir Eugene and I have it.'

It wasn't I who was being asked, but I couldn't help objecting. ‘Pass the word
around
?' I said.

Alec did not seem to hear me.

‘I would like you to do that, Waldo.'

‘It will bring people to us,' Alec told me in explanation as we re-entered the main part of the hut. AB Stigworth was serving sherry around the room, a ritual of gentility that always went strangely wrong, since most of the men had nowhere to drink it but sitting on and standing round their bunks. ‘Men will come to us and ask us what Victor knew about them. We can interview them without summoning them, without our having to admit that Victor's death was an inflicted one.'