The Ice Lovers (11 page)

They milled about outside the airport. She was unused to milling, to waiting for other people. They were a manifest, a sequence of names to be herded onto the rickety bus that would carry them from the military airport into the capital, where she will be billeted, two or more to a room, with other women. She wanted to turn to someone and say, ‘I don't remember enlisting in the Army.'

On the trip into Stanley she looked out the window and saw dingy sheep, the road lined with Danger! Land mines! signs, little black skulls on them. The sun came out and she had to close her eyes. How strange the light of the Falklands was, she thought, like staring into white bones.

By the time they pulled up in Stanley the day had darkened. The town centre consisted of a few government buildings, a supermarket, a church, and their hotel. Helen was just old enough to remember the grainy images of the War on television, the crippled destroyers listing in the water, their hulls ripped open by Exocet missiles. Even though she had done her share of war reporting, she had never expected to find herself in the landscape of those photographs and faded videos. The place looked just the same: windswept and jerry-built, the mustard hills, the mottled khaki grass.

At their hotel, the reception desk was empty. Eventually a man with a Midlands accent wearing a kitchen apron and carrying a meat cleaver showed up, opened an envelope, and out spilled their keys. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Have to go back to making dinner.' She exchanged looks with the tall man she'd spoken to in Santiago.

‘It could have been worse,' she said. ‘He could have gone for us with the meat cleaver.'

‘Welcome to the Goose,' he said; in his voice a hint of You'll see.

The hotel was perhaps an intentional simulacra of a Scottish hotel of a hundred years before, with musty carpets of blue and pink thistles, matching floral sofas and floral wallpaper. Their meals were paid for, but drink was not. Cash only, no cards accepted. The Islands were in a twenty year-old time-warp of their own, Helen judged, marooned somewhere around 1995. The islanders looked like they'd stepped out of a BBC newsreel, with their too-big spectacles, their amphibious Barbour gear. They had a ruddy-windswept complexion, but also wrinkled and haggard – victims perhaps of the low ozone cover over the Islands.

Helen caught sight of the tall man again at dinner. He wasn't eating with the rest of the conscripts in the dining room, that was clear; he wore a dinner jacket and a tie. He looked hurried, and distracted, as if there was anywhere one could hurry to, in such a place.

After dinner she went for a walk in a stinging, bitter wind. Wavelets lapped against the shores of the narrow harbour. The few streetlights cast a smudged light onto the pavements, and jeeps tore up and down the main road. She walked facing the wind and the sleet. And this was summer!

She arrived back at the hotel in time to see the tall man leave the front door, his dinner jacket covered by a windbreaker, walking head down up the road, into the wind.

David's visits to the Islands follow a pattern: there is the meeting with the governor at Government House, followed by a reception for the local councillors and the MP, if she is in the Islands. During the summer season when the HMS Resolute is in town, he has a briefing with the Navy commander.

The governor's house is stocked with antiques that had taken a battering on their journey down the length of the Atlantic. Chipped edges. A cloudy mirror. Sherry (they still served it!) was doled out before dinner. Is that so? I would have thought Falklands House and the FCO might have joined forces on that one. Conversations with the governor, the chief of police, the commander of Mount Pleasant base. Tonight he was on automatic. He liked the Islands, he cared about their fate. Why then could he not concentrate? His eye was drawn out the window, where pale lupines blew in the wind. Something the woman had said, in Santiago, the historian/journalist. About always having been fascinated by the stories of the explorers' trials, but feeling locked out, because she was a woman.

He'd said, it's not like that anymore. You can trek across the continent, if you want to. Plenty of women have done it.

Not plenty, she'd corrected him. In fact, only five or six. And then listed their names. Oh, he had said. Point taken. And felt foolish, then. As if he were in a meeting in a cabinet room, arguing over the nuances of fishing rights. He could have said something witty, encouraging. Point taken.

‘David? How long do you think The Hague will take to rule on the Weddell Sea claim?'

‘Not as long as they took to rule on the Scotia Sea, let's hope.'

The exploration operation for seabed oil was run out of the Falklands. Seismic ships were anchored in Stanley Sound. He would make many, many more trips to the islands to sort through the thorny matter of resource exploration, natural gas sinks, the inevitable outrage of the Argentines.

‘What do you think, David – will the Treaty hold?'

‘That's what I spend most of my time on now. It's not easy. The Russians are riding high on their oil finds in the Arctic. People are desperate to find new supplies.'

He had not answered the question. This was his special and relatively recently acquired skill, to dodge giving a truthful answer. The FCO had sent him on a flock of courses: Media Management, Public Speaking, Techniques of Information Disclosure. So he did not say: I think the Antarctic Treaty's days are numbered. Soon it will no longer be a continent set aside for science, free of land grabs, of pollution and exploitation. The world had given up on the ice caps; all the science pointed to their inevitable disappearance. Let the ice melt, then, if there's nothing we can do about it, and get on with mitigating the damage. These were sentiments uttered in cabinet briefings, in phone conversations between world leaders that David was suddenly privy to, as Polar Man.

In the meantime the ice sheets could be mined, for data, yes, for clues as to how they were all going to survive a sudden five-degree temperature rise, because this had happened in the past. The ice cores proved it. But the last time the temperature had jumped five degrees there had been no humans on the planet, or very few.

Their ship was delayed somewhere around South Georgia; the governor informed David, but in fact he'd already heard the news from the FIPASS chief, who'd got the news on HF radio. News travelled fast in the Falklands. This was another reason he liked the Islands – the chain of command just did not exist. You found out vital pieces of information in the queue at the West Store supermarket.

Eventually, someone said, as they always did, Did you know David's great-grandfather was… And pointed to the picture hanging above the mantelpiece. David was required to turn his face and pay homage to his ancestor.

‘He was one of the men plucked off Elephant Island by Shackleton,' the governor explained to his guests. ‘Just as they teetered on the edge of starvation.' And, some said, insanity, David added, mentally.

His great-grandfather was another reason why David was Polar Man: he had the pedigree, and even while he fought against privilege, against inheritance, he realised it had shaped his life. He turned to face his ancestor, who stood with his comrades, four men in fishermen's jumpers, their skin blackened with soot from the blubber stoves they cooked on, underneath the upturned lifeboat which was their only shelter. His mother used to tell him he was a carbon copy, with his tall frame and large brown eyes, a face with the skin pulled tightly to the skull. David wasn't sure. His great grandfather looked tense, handsome, transfixed by a remote awareness, one that was made available to very few human beings. His was a learned face, not in any way indulged but not corroded either, by lassitude or self-satisfaction or by any other flaccid, difficult-to-spot vice. Perhaps he had been burnt by other, more delicate terrors – luck, randomness, will. Life was random, unearned and undeserved – of this David was sure, and he hadn't had to spend three months marooned and left for nearly dead on a sub-Antarctic island to find this out. The most deserving suffer, the spiteful prosper. This is not God's will. These are just the things that happen. That's life!

‘Yes, yes,' David said, a little impatiently, he realised. ‘That was my great-grandfather.' And now, exactly one hundred years later, a toast went up to him, and all the men who had survived the disaster of their expedition.

Dinner was over. People were looking to turn in; the Falklands kept farmers' hours, still. And then he was free – out into the night, free to think his own thoughts, to craft renegade opinions. Should anyone have observed him at that moment they would have seen a man walking alone down a deserted street, dressed in a dinner suit and windbreaker, grinning.

At the hotel he finds the group sitting in the bar. Although his official intention is to go to bed, he decides at the last minute to take the only empty chair, next to the journalist – historian! He has her labelled as a journalist, and somehow he knows this will annoy her. Helen, that's her name.

‘How are you getting your bearings?' he asks.

‘I have no idea where I am,' she says. Her smile is wide and unstable. ‘We've all been drinking since dinner. I'm shattered. I have no idea where I am. Oh, sorry, I've already said that. Where have you been all night then?'

He tells her about the Government House reception.

‘It's good to know Maggie's memory is alive and well –' she points to a portrait of the ex-prime minister, hanging triumphant on the hotel wall.

David thinks, this woman will be Labour or Lib Dem, so he refrains from saying, actually I quite admire some of the things she did when in office. I think history will absolve her. Instead he talks about the Antarctic. ‘It's completely insane, the appeal of the place. You'll see. When you're there, you miss home, the people you love. You think, get me out of here! As soon as you're out you start scheming to get back. That's all you want to do, all you can think: get me back to the Antarctic.'

David so loves this chapter of the experience: unless you were flying in and stuck in the Falklands due to weather, the days before leaving for the Antarctic always harboured expectation, the pull of an enigma. Even if they would eventually pull up to a stark wharf ringed by green outbuildings situated among piles of loose shale, like a granite quarry, and they would all be shocked at the isolation, at the simplicity.

She laughs, and he can see this delights her, too, this paradox and wonder. They are going to a place where there is nothing, and they are so excited, like children. Look at him, he has been to the Antarctic eight times now, and he still loves it.

‘Even here, in the Islands,' she begins, ‘I can feel the pull of something, just over the horizon. It feels like we're about to go to a colony, or another planet. I feel like I'm leaving the world.'

‘You are,' he said. ‘Travelling to the Antarctic is like going nowhere else, except maybe outer space. It's the last place in the world without money or cars. And home to no one. It's nobody's country.'

‘Do you think about the Antarctic,' she asks, ‘when you are home?'

‘Yes,' he says. Then, ‘ No.' He pauses. ‘I mean, yes and no.'

She laughs and again he sees her wide, spontaneous laugh, how alive to the contradictions of life she is. And also something else… she has been set free, although he is not sure from what. Not from drinks parties, official duties, the burden of serving Her Majesty's Government. No, her release is more mysterious.

‘Yes,' he clarifies, once and for all. ‘I think about the Antarctic all the time. I miss it, even when I'm there.'

‘Why?'

‘I think it's because I'm always aware of leaving. That it will soon be time to leave, or other people are leaving, or that no one can ever stay there. The Antarctic forces you to live for the moment. You want to stay there forever, and you know you can't, and are simultaneously relieved that you will eventually have to go.'

He finds she is staring at him with a sobered expression.

‘But don't quote me on any of this,' he smiles.

‘Don't worry. I probably won't quote you on anything.'

He looks at her, momentarily shocked, then sees she is joking. ‘Good,' he says, and laughs. ‘I'd be really put out if you didn't quote me on something.'

Their group roars with ragged, disapproving laugher, some shared and ribald joke that David and Helen have missed due to their private conversation, and they all order another round.

He stays up far too late and drinks far too much. On his way to bed that night, climbing the uncertain stairs up to the second floor and no longer in Helen's company, David has a familiar feeling; it is very like what he feels for the Antarctic when he is away from it, or has been prevented from returning to it – an indefinite, treacherous growl of separation.

The next morning Helen walked out into a bleached, punishing sun. She had been warned to wear sunscreen in the Islands, no matter the weather. The ozone ‘hole' may have partially knit itself together, but ozone cover was still very thin in the Southern Ocean.

She had read that the Islands lay at the same latitude south as London occupied north, more or less, 51.15 degrees, but the light was entirely different. There was a harried, beacon quality to it, as if it were eager to move on once it had identified what lived under its spotlight. The light did not disperse itself through the sky, but fell in shards, like glass or metal. Then there was the wind, which arrived in bucking sheets from the west. The weather changed several times a day – sun, cloud, hail, sleet, then sun again, within hours. But always there was the wind. It never seemed to calm.

David was walking down the road on the other side in the other direction. She watched as he crossed the road, first looking out for hurtling Land Rovers.

‘Did you hear about the ship?'

‘Yes, I saw.' A scrawled piece of paper had gone up on the hotel notice board that morning to say that their ship would be three days late coming into port.