Out of the Ice (27 page)

I felt terrible. It was devastating to think of the death of a child down there. But Helen hadn’t dismissed the notion of tunnels under Fredelighavn. She’d embraced it. Clearly she’d wondered all these years about them.

I didn’t believe in ghosts. There was a boy down there. One I could save. If I could find the tunnels, I could find him.

16

I
woke cocooned in feather-soft sheets that smelled of salt and roses. Sitting up I remembered where I was, and the grief of yesterday’s conversation came flooding back: little Peter, his photos buried with his mother who had died of a broken heart.

The friendship between Nancy and Helen was strong. I’d be like that with Kate and Georgia when I was old. Island life had similarities to Antarctica: friendships were more intense, enduring. Creating new memories; protecting us from the abyss of loss.

I hauled myself out of bed and had a quick shower, the steam fragrant from a spiced cranberry soap.

By the time I went downstairs, Nancy was serving up breakfast. Two puffy pancakes smothered in cranberry jam were placed in front of me. As I put the first forkful in my mouth, the cranberries exploded, sharp and sweet. There was a glass of fresh cranberry juice to wash them down.

‘Sleep well?’ Nancy shuffled back in an oversized fleecy dressing gown and placed another hot pancake on my plate. I devoured the lot and had a fourth, the food so different to the fare I’d eaten in the past twelve months.

‘So we’ll go over to Helen’s and see if we can make head or tail of the papers stashed in her attic. She was going to bring them down herself but I convinced her to let you do it. You’re much stronger and younger than us.’ Nancy beamed.

I was touched they’d forgiven me so quickly.

‘And don’t you go listening to my friend about those poor old whales. The men had to make a living. I doubt any of them really liked the killing. It was something they had to do. They were brave adventurers who put this country on the map long before those west-coasters went out into the prairies.’

I thought it best to let the conversation stop there. I didn’t want to get into a fight about the slaughter of American Indians on top of what happened to the whales. Yet I couldn’t help feeling a grudging respect for the ancestors of Nancy and Helen. It wouldn’t have been easy for them. I tried to convince myself that they didn’t know that whales had feelings akin to humans. The field of cognitive ethnology had only begun in the 1970s, when scientists put forward the theory that whales could not only feel, but love. I remembered Lev’s care when I swam with him – it would stay with me forever.

Suddenly breakfast wasn’t sitting well as I tried to bat away images of the whales being stripped of their blubber at Fredelighavn.

‘Something wrong with the pancakes?’ Nancy hovered close.

‘No, they’re delicious.’ We chatted over coffee and then I went up to my room to put in a call. I was eager to start trawling through Erling’s papers but I wanted to set up a meeting with Snow. If I didn’t find anything about the tunnels today, I could leave the women searching while I went to re-establish a connection with the one person who might be able to tell me what was going on at Fredelighavn. I looked up his department at Harvard online, found the number, and dialled. After a while a woman picked up the phone.

‘I was wondering if I could speak to Professor Andrew Flynt please? It’s Doctor Alvarado calling.’

‘I’m sorry, Doctor Alvarado, but Professor Flynt isn’t with us.’

‘He’s not come in yet since Antarctica?’ I asked confidently.

She paused. ‘Professor Flynt is no longer on staff.’

I went silent with shock, and tried to gather my thoughts. ‘When did that happen? I mean, when did he leave?’

‘A few months ago. Back in July.’

I felt the blood drain from my face. ‘Do you have a contact where I can reach him?’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t give out that information. Is there someone else who can help you?’

‘Thanks anyway.’ I hung up and sat on the bed, realising now the folly of my plan. Why had Snow lied? I thought of how he’d ignored me on the trip back to America, and how evasive he’d been when we’d arrived. Was Georgia right about him?

I hauled myself up and stared out the window at the boats in the harbour. The
Sankaty
was coming in again, slowly approaching the dock.

How would I find Snow now? And he certainly wouldn’t be pleased to see me. I looked at the time. Georgia would be asleep, so I sent her an email.

Nancy called up from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Ready to head to Helen’s?’

‘Could I just have a few more minutes, please?’ I called back.

‘Take as long as you need, Laura. Come down when you’re ready.’

I went back online, searching for Sam Wiltshire, a colleague I knew at Harvard in marine biology, who I’d worked with in Melbourne. I found his email address and sent a message, saying I was in the States briefly and would love to catch up. Could he contact me as soon as he could?

I stared out at the harbour again, trying to make sense of what I’d just heard about Snow. I longed to speak to Georgia, but Nancy was waiting in the kitchen.

The day was mild, with a fresh sea breeze as we walked around to Helen’s house. Birdsong filled the air. Most of the trees were bare, their skeletal branches overhanging the street. High up, I caught sight of a bright red bird. The reddest bird I’d ever seen, flitting between a few vibrant orange leaves that still clung on.

‘Whatever’s that?’ I stopped to gaze at the bird.

Nancy peered up. In a red flash, the bird flew to another tree. As it perched, I saw it had a top-notch sticking from its head. It was cheeky and sublime. And perfect. A fiery, audacious bird.

‘That’s a cardinal. There’s a couple live out back in my hydrangeas,’ said Nancy. ‘In fall they seem to move about the streets. One of the prettiest birds you’re likely to see.’

The cardinal seemed full of hope as it flitted from tree to tree, its striking red burning against the pale sky.

Helen opened the door seconds after we knocked. ‘Come in, come in, I have a pot brewing. No doubt you’ve had breakfast but I’ve baked some blueberry muffins.’

All hint of yesterday’s tension had disappeared. She took my arm and led me down the passage, smelling of spicy cranberries, like me.

I loved the homeliness of the kitchen, its warmth and sweet aromas. Helen had set three mugs on the table again, which she filled with dark, rich coffee. She took the blueberry muffins from the oven and arranged them on another creamware plate. Although I was full, I couldn’t resist eating one – and then another. I had to force myself to stop or I would’ve eaten the whole batch. They were sweet without being cloying, and the blueberries, plump and juicy, were even tastier than the cranberries in Nancy’s jam.

‘So, I’ve been going through the boxes in the attic,’ said Helen, ‘but I stuck to my promise and have waited for you to bring them down.’

‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘I can finish my coffee as we look through.’

Both Helen and Nancy scowled. ‘Those papers are precious, my dear,’ said Helen. ‘There’ll be no drinking or eating while they’re out. I have cotton gloves for us to wear.’

‘All the originals are here,’ said Nancy. ‘The archives only have copies.’

‘Isn’t that the opposite of what you’d normally do?’ I asked, surprised, and they both laughed.

‘We do as must needs,’ said Helen. ‘I could never part with Daddy’s papers, and he didn’t want me to either. He left strict instructions.’

‘You’re very lucky that you’re going to see these,’ said Nancy.

We quickly finished our coffee and climbed a broad staircase. At the top of a second flight of stairs was a small door. Helen went ahead and opened it.

Old timber shelves lined the walls, filled with boxes of paperwork, neatly filed.

‘What you want is over here,’ said Helen, leading the way.

I carried down a total of twenty-four boxes. We placed them in chronological order on the kitchen table, and on sofas in the adjoining lounge room. Helen passed us each a pair of cotton gloves and once they were on, she opened the first box and brought out a stack of papers browning at the edges. They were hand-written, in English.

‘Let’s see what we have here,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been through these.’ Her hands trembled as she began to look.

‘Well, we each need a heap,’ said Nancy, ‘or we’ll be here all year.’

I took my batch and found myself staring at research notes. They seemed to be for Erling’s book. For the first hour I scanned ghastly descriptions of how, by the time Erling and his family arrived at South Safety Island, some of the ships had been adapted to process the whales on-board rather than have to take them all to shore. Pelagic whaling allowed the whalers to slaughter and process thousands more whales, stripping off the blubber either on factory ships, or towing the whales to a safe harbour and flensing them beside the boat. They were killing so many whales, there wasn’t room for them all at Fredelighavn. But the shore station used the whole of the whale with no wastage, and Erling’s father Lars, and later Erling and his brother Olaf, enjoyed processing guano as well as oil. Erling gave vivid descriptions of the various cookeries involved along the way. I started to scan quickly, whipping through page after page, not wanting to fill my head with the horrible images.

‘You’re a fast reader,’ said Helen. She’d only got through a few pages, savouring every description of her father’s – which meant she probably didn’t have accounts of whale slaughter.

‘May I?’ I said, and reached out to her pile.

‘You don’t like yours?’

‘It’s about life on board the ships and what they did to the whales.’

‘Then here you go.’ Helen gave me the rest of her stack. ‘This stuff’s interesting.’ She opened a fresh box while I started to read through my new papers. She was right – it was a daily description of life on shore: the operation of the bakery, fights between the pigs, which ships were being fixed in the repair yard and problems with the conveyor belts around the station. There was, however, no mention of tunnels. I moved to another box and pulled out its yellowed papers.

These were about the entertainment at Fredelighavn: a list of films that were screened in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Mainly old horror movies, a lot from Val Lewton:
Cat People
,
Curse of the Cat People
,
The Body Snatcher
,
I Walked with A Zombie
. I smiled to think of the whalers and their families enjoying being spooked at the end of the earth.

They’d also put on plays, organised by Ingerline. There was plentiful description of the productions – surprisingly, Shakespeare, and a few Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. Ingerline seemed to have become anglicised. It occurred to me I hadn’t yet asked an obvious question.

‘Did Ingerline come to Nantucket?’

‘Granny Inga? Of course. Winter, she was always in Antarctica, because that’s summer down there. But each Northern summer when it was winter in Fredelighavn she lived right here with us. Every second year, that is. In between she lived with Uncle Olaf or Uncle Julius in Larvik in Norway. Uncle Julius ran the company from there. The Larvik Fishing Company. It was a real family affair. Granny Inga had raised her sons well. And she hoped we’d all go into the company one day, me included.’

‘What was she like?’

Helen’s face relaxed and her eyes twinkled. ‘Fun loving. Adored the theatre and movies. But she could be strict and stern too. After my granddad died she really was the force behind the company. A true matriarch. And of course it was Granny who expanded Fredelighavn and made it into a real village, and that was early up, in the twenties. Daddy didn’t put that in his book, I told him he should have. But I think he thought it might make his father look weak.

‘Granny wanted men to be with their families down there so they wouldn’t go rough. She organised those homes to be built. Before it was just barracks, with two separate bathhouses. A few years back I took a cruise down to Antarctica, when they started opening things up to tourists. Of course we couldn’t go to Fredelighavn but the ship stopped in at Grytviken on South Georgia. That was another whaling station run by Norwegians. Although the operations were actually owned by an Argentinian company, as Granny Inga liked to point out – so it wasn’t through and through Norwegian like ours.’

‘I know it,’ I said. ‘I’ve been there.’ I smiled to myself. I’d always thought of Grytviken as Norwegian because both the station and the South American company had been set up by a Norwegian captain. Granny Inga would have chided me.

‘Then you’d see it’s a very different place. Just one big house for the Station Head, and the barracks. It had the bakeries like us, and all the blubber-boiling sheds and guano sheds and all. But it doesn’t have the houses, does it? Not the civilised village. Although it does have a church. Granny Inga wanted hers to be more beautiful. That’s why she put that gold orb on top of the steeple.’ Helen sat back and grinned.

‘Did Ingerline run Fredelighavn for a long time?’ I asked, growing increasingly amazed by the woman, a pioneer who had been largely written out of Erling’s official history.

‘Granddad Lars passed away in 1948. I was only six, so I don’t remember him much. It was Granny I knew, the way she organised everything through the toughest years. The whale numbers were declining and there was growing hostility about the entire whaling enterprise. But Granny stuck to her guns. I loved being with her. Down at Fredelighavn and here on Nantucket. We all treasured her. The whole island – she was like a piece of living history.’

‘I adored Inga,’ said Nancy. ‘She was a formidable dame.’ The two friends laughed.

‘She died in 1982 at ninety years of age,’ said Helen. ‘She was determined to meet that milestone, and she did. Of course by then the company had been wound up years before. But Granny still alternated her time between Nantucket and Norway.’

It was remarkable to hear Ingerline spoken of with such familiarity. I was beginning to know her. The portrait I’d seen in Fredelighavn hadn’t captured her at all. If the whaling station were ever opened up to tourists, I would recommend historians record an oral history from Helen. If there were to be a museum, Ingerline would be given her rightful place in history. Apart from the sickening fact it was wholesale slaughter she was leading, her feats in designing the village were noteworthy.