The Ice Lovers (10 page)

He shook his head. ‘The thought of you spending the winter here, in this cold aquarium, watching all these animals die.'

She looked at them, seeing them with Luke's eyes, suddenly: small things, trapped in incubators. Babies, ventilators, warm skin. Incubators give life, not take it away, as she is doing. Their nervous systems frayed like bad electrical wiring.

‘In the Ellsworths you said you wanted to get away from someone,' Luke said.

She nodded. ‘I didn't actually apply, you know. Or at least not intentionally. They rang me up because someone dropped out, and the interview panel knew my supervisor.'

It was late May when she went up to Cambridge to the Polar Research Council for her interview. She had sat in a hot train carriage full of mothers with flush-faced babies melting in pushchairs. The job had initially been offered to a woman who had become – suddenly and unexpectedly, Nara assumed – pregnant, and they re-advertised the post.

The panel fixed her with severe stares. Even now, twenty years after the first women wintered at Adelaide base, they said, the ratio of men to women was still three-quarters to one. ‘This can be a difficult environment,' the chair of the panel – an eminent marine biologist – said. She would come under pressure to have a relationship, they told her, to pair off. How did she feel about that? She replied she didn't think she was a peer pressure type. If she got pregnant in the Antarctic, they said, she would be taken out immediately. ‘The cost to the taxpayer for a winter medical evacuation is approximately three hundred and fifty thousand pounds,' said the physicist.

It was in her mind to say, I won't get pregnant, no matter what. Or, If I do, I'll pay the taxpayer back.

‘Mistakes are expensive,' the biologist went on, ‘and not very easy to rectify. If you find out that it is a mistake for you to be on the continent after early April, we can't fix it. If you pull out before, we won't have time to find a replacement, and the science that year will be lost.'

‘These days people have such strange motives for going to the Antarctic,' said another man – a physicist, she thought, although she could not be sure. ‘They want to get out of the world, get away from what's happening.'

‘I'm not running away from the world. I'm going to the Antarctic.'

They left her to find her way out of the building. Thank you, thank you. Nice to have met you. I'm sorry there's no one to show you out. That's fine, I remember the way.

She did not remember the way. She wandered the wide, blue-carpeted halls, taking what she thought would be her last chance to examine a world she had briefly brushed up against, but which would never be part of her life.

The corridors were lined with large, lightbox-lit photographs of whales, penguins, ice-core drills, planes, ships, their hulls blood-bright against the ice. Down one particularly abandoned corridor she found the historic gallery – old expedition photos of men with beards and dogs, ice sculptures dripping from both noses. And her reflection, superimposed on penguins, on giant superstructures of bases-in-progress, or at least someone very much like her: a small woman, fine-featured, eyes two dark stones. She was judged pretty, she knew, by most men's standards, but an indefinite quality in her, a stillness like a dark bowl, would always keep men away.

The corridors were unusually wide; on each side were doors leading to offices or labs; each door had only a small slot window, like prison cells. She stayed there for some time, spying as white-coated scientists filtered seawater and slid trays in and out of mass spectrometers. When she finally found the reception area and the exit, it was by accident.

They were outside the aquarium now, taking off their jackets. Nara offered to make him a cup of tea, to warm up. ‘So you see,' she said, ‘I was second choice.'

Luke shook his head. ‘I don't see it that way. You were meant to get the job, and the other woman wasn't.'

‘I don't think anything is meant to be. I think things just happen.'

‘Certain things could go either way, yes, but I think there are things which are supposed to happen, for one reason or another. The Antarctic is one of them.'

After Luke left she went back to reading the newspaper online: gun warfare on the streets of south London, ten people dead in a month. Migrants from Mauritania thrown to the sharks by their traffickers, a hijack attempt on an airliner in Russia by Muslim separatists. Two pages in the science/ environment section were given to oil prospecting in the Arctic; since the summer sea ice had retreated sufficiently to allow exploration nearly ten years before, Russia had erected offshore platforms, just beyond the boundary of the ice. Seismic ships and temporary drilling platforms sucked oil from the Lemonsov ridge. In the International Court in the Hague, Russia, the United States and Canada were in dispute over territorial rights to the Northwest Passage: it was a new Cold War; the newspapers had dubbed it the Ice War.

The news seemed unreal. On base they called the rest of the world the Real World, or Out There. Out There, people were dying. In the summers they died of heat exhaustion, in the winter of influenza. Here, nothing would touch them. The world could combust in nuclear warfare, and the katabatic winds of the continent would protect them. Radiation would simply circle the earth thousands of miles above them, driven by the Coriolis effect, which had little influence on the winds of the extreme southern hemisphere. Southern Patagonia and Antarctica would be unscathed. They would survive, for a while at least, until the food stocks ran out.

What they feared most in the Antarctic, it turned out, was not cold or disease, but fire. Fire could not be contained, it took hold in seconds, fuelled by the dryness of the air. If the buildings burnt down they would be left exposed. So they do fire drills, fire alarm tests, oil spill drills, fire-fighting exercises, donning smoke hoods, wielding fire extinguishers. The whoop of the alarm every Wednesday morning, all of them standing on the deck, shivering.

In the Antarctic, the change of the seasons is abrupt. Suddenly the dynamic brightness of summer is gone, like a giant klieg light switched off. There is no enchantment in the polar day, she realises, only these solar floodlights, ruthlessly simplified, dragging all energy into reverse; the sun was so full of light it turned black. It lacks vigour, somehow, this blizzard of white, an overdose of blankness. It feeds and exhausts her at once. She is thirsty, always. Her skin is puckered with need for moisture. Her throat is parched.

The eternal whiteness of the savage day. Outside her window, the glacier burns, consumed by its lack of pigment. This place, is it one of possibilities, or impossibilities? Soon it would reveal itself. She has no memory now – of the lakes, of swimming, years spent trying to untangle herself from her family. Here she is safe, but also futureless. Here, seeing means nothing. This place has been unwitnessed for so long, it repels the human eye effortlessly. These early winter nights before she falls asleep a voice springs up inside her head – it is not her voice, perhaps it is not even human. It is coming through her, travelling from a long way away. It asks her a hunted question: Will the world end in ice, or fire, or will it simply wear away?

PART III
Running Out of Night

1

He does not know her yet, but she sits ten rows behind him on the Dreamliner, Boeing's long-range, low-emissions aircraft which had come into service a few years before. He declines to travel business class, even if the FCO would pay. He doesn't believe in privilege. You burn up the same carbon whether you sit in first or steerage is Kate's response, whose use of ‘steerage' makes him wince; it strikes him as vulgar and elitist. Outside his porthole is the dark night, the Brazilian rainforest beneath him.

He rarely reads on flights these days, or watches films. He finds enough to entertain him in watching the flight map: the skycam, the tailcam, the plane silver and spookily artificial, like a holograph, clouds scudding beneath it, the temperature screen (–63°C), the kilometres to destination (4,603). At the bottom of the flight map is a blue-white landmass. The map gives it identifying place-names, but not its one true name: Antarctica.

He silently recites the names of its explorers: Drake, Darwin, Cook, Weddell, Palmer, Biscoe, Bellingshausen, Ross, who as captain of the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror was an early oceanographer, undertaking comprehensive studies of the ocean. It was he who first saw the great volcano, which he named after the Erebus. Then D'urville, Drygalski, the Scot Bruce, Charcot, whose expedition was named Porquoi Pas. Why not, indeed? Why not go to the Antarctic, why not perform mapping, geology, glaciology, botany, tidal observations?

His great-grandfather had been part of this world; a naturalist, he signed on to Shackleton's Endurance expedition in 1913 and spent 1915–16 trapped in ice, fighting for his life. His great-grandfather had been a great naturalist, but ended up being remembered for a feat of survival. He ought to have followed his ancestor's example, chosen a life of a frenzy of cataloguing, acquiring knowledge of the earth, doing inventories; the simplicity and reassurance of measurements, of inquiry. Instead he had waded into the slew of politics.

Ten rows behind him she is unknown, even if he has caught a glimpse of her while standing in the queue at Heathrow, the sort of glimpse that is so instantly forgotten it turns up later in dreams, and he wonders, how did I dream that stranger's face into being? I am sure I have never seen that face before. But he has, of course, in the queue at Heathrow. On the Dreamliner Helen might be a dream, she might not exist at all, she might be someone he invents in a future reverie. We dream ourselves into being as much as anything that could be said to lead to a more solid existence: David firmly believed that much of life was illusory. This was a great secret, especially in the circles he moved in, of facts and decisions and legal measures and instruments. He thinks. We glow, we are blind arrows in the night.

At the instant the thought blooms in David's mind, two fishermen in one of the countless tributaries of the Amazon River near the town of Santarém look up into the sky and see thin lights, far away: a slim fish, high above them, streaking through the night.

Later, Helen would not be able to remember the first thing they said to each other. It must have been in Chile, at their Santiago hotel. A comment about the weather, the sudden rush of heat and light of the southern hemisphere summer. It was late November and they had left behind a watery, mild autumn. The sun shone in her eyes.

‘I can't find my sunglasses,' she said, and squinted unhappily. She wanted no man to see her wrinkled brow, the two lines which had appeared, seemingly overnight, beneath her eyes only a year ago and had spent the past twelve months entrenching themselves. Until recently she could have been taken for a very young woman. Now she saw people sizing her up, trying to date her. She might be very young or surprisingly old.

For all she knew, this was what he was thinking, this tall man in front of her, obscured by a stab of sunlight. His face wanted to be stern, she could see, but it had a sensitive cast, with large brown eyes.

‘Is this your first time South?'

Antarctic people referred to the continent with this shorthand – ‘South' – as if nothing else southerly existed. Before she'd had a chance to challenge this man's geographic arrogance, his mobile phone rang. ‘Sorry,' he said – unusual enough, these days, to apologise before taking a call on a mobile – and he'd walked off, beyond hearing distance. She watched him for a second or two, his expression concentrated, unsmiling. A checking-in, I'm-here-yes, expression. Wife, she thought.

Around them, a group of Chileans circulated. A corporate meeting, she guessed, the men in suits, the women in skirts of dusty pink or orange, far more colourful than you would see in England at such a function. She wondered what they made of the motley Antarctic crew who had stumbled off the plane only two hours ago milling about restlessly, pale from a distant winter.

David was still talking on the phone. She considered leaving, but their hotel rooms were still being prepared. She sat down on a lounger next to the pool, underneath an unfamiliar tree with blood-red leaves. From that position she studied him. He had made another call on his phone; now his expression was alert, despite his obvious fatigue: work call. Helen had the impression she knew him. It was not impossible; their paths might have crossed at some function or other, some seminar on future climactic doom. But when they had been talking she'd had a flash, a visual picture, of a glassy flat, a silver river rimmed by marshlands. It had come and gone in a second.

And then perhaps they exchanged a word or two in the airport the next day, before boarding the plane that took them on their hopscotch flight to Puerto Montt, then Punta Arenas, then finally to the Falkland Islands, which the LAN-Chile crew rigorously called Malvinas/Falklands, although with a scurrying pronunciation – ‘Vaklan' – as if they did not want to say the word at all.

Then the terrifying landing at the military airport on East Falkland, the plane sheared sideways by the most forceful crosswind she had ever felt in twenty years of white-knuckled landings in terrible places, skirting mustard-coloured hills streaked by rivers of grey stone. Then the shock of the military nature of the airport – jeeps driven at breakneck speed by men in fatigues, planes with no distinguishing markers, which reminded her of the renditions flights she had seen sitting on the tarmac in Kandahar, the squat Chinook helicopters on the apron, also familiar, their bellies slit open to reveal troops in combat fatigues. Inside there was a separate queue for civilians and personnel. Alert Code BIKINI, read a sign above the luggage carousel. Was that good or bad? she wondered. Beside it, a sign informed them that THE ENEMY IS LISTENING. Yet another instructed people in Spanish to prepare their passports for inspection, and listed items which could not be brought into the islands, among them guns and fruit.