A Victim of the Aurora (19 page)

‘I don't know,' Barry said.

Everything was changed for me. Even by moonlight, Erebus now looked like a companion. In the space of perhaps a mile's walk a dazzling blue drapery aurora defined itself over the Victoria Land mountains. I imagined Paul and Alec and myself hauling our light sleds to Cape Crozier beneath such wonders. I could feel the shape of the pudding-can growing blood-warm inside my clothes.

‘Mind you,' said Barry who, untouched by my elation, was still thinking away, ‘I
have
posited a Forbes-Chalmers who beats Victor up and leaves him there, down by the hut, then finds his way back to his hutch, two miles in a blizzard.'

I had overlooked this obvious problem, as people in ecstasy do overlook the obvious. I stopped and noticed the cold again. It felt as if it were falling into the –60s. I could feel the air burning as it entered my sinuses. All that was needed now to make us stagger crabwise, wincing, our faces averted northwards, was a fifteen-knot wind. Barry kept strolling and spinning theories.

‘No worry,' he said, ‘no worry. He must have an ice hole down near the beach for emergencies, somewhere down at the mouth of the Barne. In fact, he'd have to. Imagine if he's out clubbing a Weddell seal and one of those winds comes down off the plateau. We get some kind of warning about these things from Waldo's instruments. But Forbes-Chalmers gets none at all. He has to have some hole down there. I didn't find it yesterday. But then we didn't find his main residence today.
Positing
,' (it was becoming his favourite word) ‘
positing
a beach hole, let me paint the scene as it happens. He meets Victor in the middle of a blizzard. I mean, the middle of the blizzard is no tough time of rendezvous to a man who's lived here alone for four years. And Victor's one of those crazy journalists who would love to be able to tell the world how he interviewed an Antarctic castaway in the middle of a bloody storm. Real Stanley and bloody Livingstone stuff. Forbes-Chalmers does Victor all that damage – the damage
you
say was all frost-bite but Sweep Stigworth thought was genuine bottled-in-bond punishment. Forbes-Chalmers crawls back to his coastal hole. He doesn't even hear our search parties. And when the blizzard starts to die early the next morning, he traipses back to his main residence before we've finished breakfast.'

‘Yes,' I told him. Regenerated. ‘Yes.'

‘Otherwise,' he pursued. ‘Otherwise … do you think loneliness could endow man with a strong directional instinct? Like a whale's?'

7

Half the things the members of the British South Polar Expedition learned in Antarctica they learned at table. Now they had discovered from Sir Eugene, over dinner, that it seemed Forbes-Chalmers was not a chimera. The sailors, who had eaten a little earlier, had been asked in so that they could hear too. I saw the Russians smiling at each other. Though they barely understood the speech, they knew it was all benign talk. They trusted God and Eugene Stewart to bring the sun back.

‘So, Lieutenant Troy,' Sir Eugene said, turning towards Troy's place at table, ‘your six puddings are accounted for.'

There was a stutter of pointed laughter from the sailors, who had to work with Troy and suffer the sharper edge of his fear that stores would go missing by the gross and he would again be blamed.

Sir Eugene held up the tin I had retrieved from Forbes-Chalmers' dump. He turned it in his hand as I had earlier in the day – as if to read its label. ‘We mustn't seek him too keenly,' he said. I suppose
seek him too keenly
was a bashful synonym for
hunt him alive
. ‘Not only because he may react with blows, but because it might drive him farther and farther up the slopes of Erebus where, no matter how successfully he has survived so far, he could not hope to out live a blizzard. All we can do is watch for him and, should he appear, call to him in as welcoming a way as we can. And if he runs, and we think we can catch him, call at least one friend and go in pursuit. But if we know he's too far away to catch, let the poor man run. Let him run.'

He sat and called for another cup of tea. I could see Barry across the table, making angry mouths over Sir Eugene's coyness.

As soon as the meal ended and while some of the sailors were still in his end of the hut, he went and spoke to Walter O'Reilly. Walter had rigged a device that told him when his bread was baked. It involved two terminals inside the oven attached to batteries outside. One terminal was fixed at the desired height for the loaf, the other rose on the crust. The two terminals united when the crust was high enough, and the bell rang.

Now Barry wanted Walter to rig that device to a sled, then leave the sled outside the door. For if the garbage dump was any sign, Forbes-Chalmers needed a sled. Would there be a way, Barry asked, of making two terminals meet and ring a bell if Forbes-Chalmers tried to take a sled?

Watching the conference, I felt a brief depression. I wondered would the crime, and Forbes-Chalmers, the elected criminal, yield to minor battery-operated mechanisms?

I had been standing by the table in the end-of-dinner scrimmage. As everyone edged and squeezed to get to the location of their work or leisure, and while AB Stigworth already whisked at the floor beneath our feet with his broom, Alec took my elbow.

‘Sir Eugene,' he said yet again. It was like a replay of the beginning of one of those sickening interviews of the past two days. And the alcove, and the suitcase. And Sir Eugene in his cardigan, taking me in with his bright wistful eyes. There was a difference tonight. Bernard Mulroy, AB Mulroy, storeman, stand-by cook, stood by the desk and, in the corner by the bed, stood his brother PO Percy Mulroy.

When the curtain was again closed we were very crowded in there. Impishly I patted the bed beside me. ‘Care for a seat, Petty Officer?' I asked the senior Mulroy.

‘No thank you, Mr Piers,' he said.

His young brother was ethereal, pre-Raphaelite, but Percy had the same features stamped more heavily on a broad, slightly brutal face.

Sir Eugene promised the brothers they could trust Dr Dryden and Mr Piers. Elated with finding Forbes-Chalmers's dump, I did feel – very nearly – trustworthy.

‘Now,' Sir Eugene continued. ‘Now, AB Mulroy, you say you fed Forbes-Chalmers the puddings.'

AB Bernard Mulroy looked solely at his clasped hands while he spoke. ‘I left them out for him at night.'

‘Why?'

‘Mr Henneker asked me to.' A lover's favour, I thought.

Sir Eugene shook his head, a little impatient with this piecemeal information. ‘Tell us everything,' he said.

‘Mr Henneker told me he saw the man two nights running. The first night Mr Henneker sighted him down on the beach. Stumbling along, he told me, near the tide crack. It was while Mr Henneker was night watchman. Mr Henneker was so excited he decided to go night watchman twice in a row and I think Dr Warwick had been sick, so Mr Henneker stood Dr Warwick's watch. Well, this time he saw him again. He says he saw him down at the dog lines and the man had a knife and looked like he was going to slaughter a dog and take it away for meat. So Mr Henneker yelled at the feller and of course the feller ran. Mr Henneker was very excited. He wanted to attract that man back but he didn't want that man to go slaughtering dogs. Because Mr Henneker believed the dogs would be needed later, he didn't much believe in tractors. Mr Henneker therefore asked me to leave food out there on clear nights. Anything I could come by, leave it out there near the dog lines. I used to wrap it up in little bits of sailcloth I found around the place. So I suppose I left food out there, in sight of the pony lines, about seven or eight times. It was no sense putting it out there if there was any snow at all because drift would just cover it. The last half-dozen times I left out food I saved from my own rations, because after I'd set out the puddings I didn't want to take any more from the general store. It was better to go hungry myself.

He looked a second at his brother, impassive in the corner. I recognized what the boy was doing, calling in his elder brother to correct or humiliate him, a cringe he had probably practised since babyhood. Percy Mulroy said nothing, so the young brother continued. ‘The truth is, Percy – PO Mulroy – caught me trying to nick some tinned beef for Mr Henneker's visitor and he prevented me.'

‘I punished you,' said PO Mulroy, mentally considering whatever the punishment had been and approving it all over again. ‘I punished you.'

‘Punished?' asked Sir Eugene. ‘Punished your brother?'

‘The way, sir, a brother does punish a brother.'

‘What way is that?'

‘Chastisement, sir. I chastised my brother the way I have always chastised him.'

‘Do you mean
beat
your brother, PO Mulroy?'

For the first time the story had made Sir Eugene angry. ‘Were you aware that no commissioned or non-commissioned officer has the right to strike a rating?'

‘Sir, I was obeying a higher authority so to speak.'

‘Who might that be, PO Mulroy? God?'

‘I was obeying my mother, sir.'

‘Your mother told you to beat up your brother?'

‘To look after him, sir. She got me to make a solemn promise. Look after him, she said.' The memory made him talkative and he smiled a little, as if inviting us all to consider the quaint and amiable woman his mother had been. ‘She didn't know how big the navy was. Or how hard it was for a brother on one of His Majesty's vessels to look after a brother on another.'

‘By what logic, PO Mulroy, does
look after
become physical blows.'

I knew Mulroy could have told Sir Eugene that in the Merseyside slums the brothers came from, the terms were synonymous. But Mulroy could sense he would not win this argument. His throat was red as if from the pressure of all the answers he had never been allowed to give.

‘It is not to happen again,' Sir Eugene told him, as if fraternal punishment were the cause of the meeting.

When the massive sledder was sent away there instantly seemed to be more air to breathe. Even Bernard Mulroy, the shamed rating, lifted his face a little towards us. I hated being there, part of the landscape of a humiliation he would remember all his life. For there was a shift of focus in the room now. Sir Eugene and Alec and myself all exhaled and took up a stance to consider the phenomenon before us. It must have been painful for the boy.

‘Tell me, Mulroy,' Sir Eugene said quietly. ‘Were Victor Henneker and yourself friends?'

‘I suppose so, sir.'

‘In a way that most men are never friends with each other?'

‘I … yes, sir. Although it's common enough on the lower deck, sir. That kind of friendship.'

‘Is that the truth?' asked Sir Eugene. He did not want an answer. ‘Men treating other men,' he went on, in a small voice, ‘as if they were women. Is that it?'

‘You … you could say so, sir.'

‘And your brother Percy knew about your friendship with Victor?'

‘It upset him more than anything. That's why he talked Lieutenant Troy into choosing me as his storeman. Percy thought I'd be out of that kind of thing down here.'

‘I see.' Sir Eugene looked at us with a half-smile. ‘The expedition had a purpose I was not aware of.'

The boy did not answer.

‘Your brother beat you then. Would he have decided to beat up Mr Henneker?'

‘Oh no.' The concept shocked AB Mulroy. ‘I was his brother like. He didn't do that to gentlemen. Percy said he knew better than coming in here talking to Mr Henneker. In Percy's eyes, it was my fault. He kept telling me I could stop it if I wanted. The friendship, I mean. And then it stopped anyhow.'

‘It stopped?'

‘Mr Henneker got … got sick of it.' The boy began weeping. At the time and in innocence I thought, why it's just like
real
love. ‘I couldn't make the sort of conversation he was used to. If he told me a story about famous people, he had to explain what they were famous for. It used to make him angry.'

Again I asked myself, do they
really
couple and split apart for the same reasons as men and women? My God! I thought. I had never been to the sort of school where older boys fell in love with younger ones. In my part of the country acts of bestiality, farmboys and heifers, featured dominantly in the sexual lore of my boyhood, and in ignorance I had considered that homosexuality was of the same level of aberration as those shocking barnyard acts.

Meanwhile, Sir Eugene let the boy weep a while. I thought the Leader was doing better work with the younger Mulroy than with the elder. Though the idea of male love so appalled him that he could not utter the word, he had somehow caused Bernard Mulroy to talk about his affection for Henneker freely, from within a homosexual context.

‘You must have been upset when Mr Henneker stopped being your friend?'

‘For a day or so. But then Percy made such a fuss about being proud of me.'

Alec, who in his surgery had obviously been presented with this problem by anxious parents, asked the question that was going begging. ‘Do you think Victor found another friend?'

‘Yes, someone he could talk with more,' said Bernard flatly. There was a wealth of self-contempt in him.

‘In the sailors' quarters? Or in the gentlemen's?'

‘Someone in the gentlemen's. A conversationalist, like.'

Sir Eugene thanked him and told him he could go.

Getting up, he nearly fell over. He must have been sitting stiff as a recruit in that chair. He went out sideways, to hide his stricken face from the gentlemen. No doubt he would go back to the sailors' quarters by way of the stables, probably hiding in the sailors' latrines until his face was composed.

After AB Mulroy had gone, Sir Eugene motioned Alec to sit in his place. They did not speak for a long time. In the end Sir Eugene spoke softly.