The Ice Lovers (27 page)

David comes to the office I have been assigned, Lab 7, and catches me looking at photos of the winter of 2011–12 on the archived drive.

‘This must be good for your research,' he says, his tone formal, also arch, simultaneously conniving and inviting. At times he speaks to me as if I were an acquaintance, someone he has only recently met.

‘I try to work in order not to panic,' I say.

David sits down, he does not answer immediately. I realise he is having difficulty speaking. When he does, his lower lip trembles, very slightly. ‘I've spoken with my wife. She said that because she can't fly down to the Falklands, and I can't fly home, I may as well stay here.' He drops his gaze. ‘What will you do?'

‘I have nothing to go back to,' I say. ‘Apart from a few dead plants. A ransacked flat, maybe. That's if I could get to London. I have friends in Brazil and Argentina, but their borders are still closed.'

I look out the window to where the glacier was growing, daily, coated with fresh snow, and beyond it the fortress ramparts of Adélie Island. ‘I don't much want to stay here, either. I'm afraid of feeling trapped.'

‘I know,' David says. ‘That's a reason in itself for spending a winter in the Falklands. At least you can move around there, however much the military have the place under lockdown.'

‘You must be given special–' I can't think of the word I want here, dispensation? Freedom? ‘Clearance?'

‘Yes and no. I'm not really sure where I would be allowed.'

‘What does your work want to do?'

‘They advise us to stay wherever we are, all of us. In fact I think I'm the only person in the whole FCO who can move right now, if I want to. Even if it's only to the Falklands.' He pauses. ‘Once you're here for the winter, you're here. The sea ice is already beginning to form, I doubt a ship could get in to pick us up in a month's time. So it's now or never.'

‘Well, not quite never, hopefully.'

‘No,' he says. But he looks as if he has not heard me.

The next day we learn that the summer base commander, the field operations manager, the meteorologist and a handful of summering scientists will leave on the last flight. Luke will fly the plane to the Falklands. We have not spoken for weeks, now, apart from an exchange of pleasantries in the bar. I can't blame him for avoiding me. He knows that in my mind she is not dead, and that everything that happened is still happening, over and over again, as if on a revolving wheel.

David joins me in the dining room to say goodbye to the departing personnel. We all shake hands, even Luke and I. The others ask me if this was a difficult decision and I say yes, that it is one of those decisions taken negatively, not positively, without any desire or volition but because I can't see what else to do. In that sense it is the easiest and also the most difficult decision I have ever taken.

Luke comes over to me, already dressed in his fleece, his hiking boots. He is the capable pilot, the man striding toward you in a bar or a hotel and you think yes, this is a real man, he will be a hunting guide, a major in the Army, an engineer.

‘I think it will help your book, staying here.'

‘In what way?'

‘Few people in the world have lived through an Antarctic winter. It will bring you closer to her.'

And then he is gone, striding away, to calculate fuel and payload, to fly his plane out of this antiseptic colony and back into the real world.

From the dining-hall windows I watch the plane take off. It is a dusky, overcast day. At the last moment, as it stands lined up on the runway I realise I should be on that plane. I have made the wrong decision. I feel trapped, despite the internet, the newspapers, the satellite link. When the plane is gone I go to my pitroom and lie down on my bunk and stare at the bottom of the bed above me, the slats of the wood, the pink and purple mattress, the frayed edge of the sheet which covers it.

The nightmare card, the crystal river woman lays down a card for my future, in a position that represents about six months ahead. It shows a black sky, the moon hidden by a cloud. She looks up at me, her elfin face dwarfed by zebra-striped glasses. I wonder what it is hiding?

At three o'clock in the afternoon it is pitch dark outside. Nara is bent over her microscope in the room they call ‘the freezer', kept at minus 80. A hunched figure, swaddled in layers of clothing.

I know from her diary that during many of those winter days, when she ought to have been attending to the creatures she was slowly cooking in the aquarium, she was actually looking at snow crystals under the electron microscope in the walk-in specimen freezer kept at a temperature of –80 degrees. She wore mukluks, two parkas, three hats.

Here she was conducting a private, sacred experiment. She was photographing snowflakes before they melted, taking meticulous notes about each of them: ‘0.08mm diameter, classic snowflake shape, spikes like the North Arm of Newfoundland. 12-sided, a flower in the middle. Branches gutted.' Others she labelled as ‘waterlilies' or ‘diatoms'.

Later she would learn via the internet that these shapes had scientific names: the boxy crystal star was a stellar dendrite; those with a transparent circle in the middle were stellar plates; there were also snowflakes called fern, rimmed crystal; sectored plate. It really was true that no two snowflakes were exactly alike. What they had in common was that they had all taken hours to fall to earth, their journeys were perilous, and they had been changed en route. Nara noted all this in her methodical scientist's hand. But these observations were a feint. She was trying to see through the crystal, into the future. She believed that if she looked at them correctly, swivelling them this way and that, like a prism they would divulge a shape greater than themselves, and which pointed to a grand design, like a divine intelligence. She was not the first person to believe this; far from it, for centuries people had been scrying into the future, using crystals. She did not know how, exactly, but she believed these crystals were a blueprint for the future, that most dangerous of countries.

5

It is three in the morning. Helen cannot keep from falling asleep, her head lolling on the cafeteria table. She walks outside in her shirtsleeves into minus 25 to jolt herself awake. Outside the air is so cold that her skin cracks, the lines around her eyes etch themselves deeper. She is losing weight. She is becoming an outline of herself.

She enters rooms, turning on and off lights, switches, shining torches in dark corners, looking for spark. She collects adjectives in her mind as she goes about her rounds, chippy shop, genny shed, lab, boatshed, MiracleSpan shed, Accommodation Block 1, Accommodation Block 2; blunt, overbearing, cutting, opinionated, unfeeling. An instinctive BBC impartiality urge prods her to add: honest, astute, witty, forthright, experienced. Stubborn, restless, pessimistic, grinding. Secretive – yes, that's what he is, fundamentally. He's a government employee, very likely a spook.

When did you become so suspicious? Who was it, who had asked her this? A friend, somewhere along the way, and recently. I'm a journalist, or at least I was one. I was trained to be suspicious. No, not like that. Like what then? How many levels could there be? There was suspicion and there was suspicion. No, she was not paranoid, only wary, wary of self-deprecation, of people with natures steeped in dreams, wary of social backgrounds and childhoods and explanations, wary of pleasure and values and scandal. Also of suspicion itself, and seduction, of dull brutes, of immaturity. Wary most of all of the incestuous love she had felt for her husband, at the end, as if he had been her brother or father and not her lover. When he died, it had been a year since they had made love.

And now men are a distant country. She is susceptible to the constant harassment that she be thin, beautiful, young, but she is no longer sure why, or she has forgotten: oh, she slaps her forehead, mentally – so that I can attract men! That is how remote it seems, to her life, the whole game. No more impossible positions, no more sick contortions called love, sex, passion. Passion kills people. It is only the most effective murderer; she would call it euthanasia, if it were not so violent. Eric's just another wasted death, his head spiked on passion's gate.

She guards her locked vault of sparse secrets: catastrophic crushes, usually in war zones, when her safety was under the command of some Major or other, as if she had been programmed for this, to fall in love with the man who protects her. Caveman instinct. The wedding ring on their fingers, always. Outside the situation they were in, at Kandahar, at Camp Bastion, where Helen had been ‘embedded', they would not have a word to say to each other.

All this took place after her husband's death. Only then did she understand the true corrosive nature of experiences: there were some things that could happen to you, on this planet and in this life, which, while bad enough, were survivable in themselves. But the really insidious thing about life, the clever trick that lived at its black heart, was that just as you were congratulating yourself for having survived them, you realised a fugitive was harbouring itself in your gut, your mind, your heart – a succubus. And this fugitive had handed you a baton of sorts, setting in motion a process of invisible destruction: Over to you now. But the trick was, the weapon would be wielded by yourself. Ingenious! Life does not have to do the killing after all. We do it for ourselves.

Not that she tried, or not openly. But these missions – to Afghanistan, in the dying days of the war, when it had become very dangerous to be a journalist there, to Somalia, Chad, Eritrea, desert countries rippling with unstable militias – had in fact become covert missions of self-destruction. At least she would die on the job. At least she would die moving. In the end, that was all she needed, as far as death was concerned – to die while moving.

At six in the morning, an hour away from the end of her shift, she finds David making a cup of tea in the dining room.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?' he proffers. ‘You must be tired.'

She says yes, she is tired. She does not answer directly about the cup of tea. David must take this as an affirmative, because he sets another cup on the counter.

‘I'm impressed, you putting yourself down for nights. You're getting into the life here. You've made yourself one of the team.'

‘Why are you up?' Next to David's careful constructions, Helen's question hangs plain-clothesed, awkward. A scarecrow next to a human being.

‘Because I can't sleep.'

They sit down, scraping out their chairs on opposite sides of the table.

‘How is your wife coping with all this?'

‘Not very well. I've had to stay away before, but not like this.' He runs his hands through his hair. Several strands stay between his fingers. They dangle there, like Christmas tinsel. ‘Is this happening to you? I'm losing my hair. I feel like I'm going into hibernation. You know, no one has had an enforced overwinter in the Antarctic in thirty years, not on this base.'

She nods, even though she didn't know that. ‘I have problems with claustrophobia,' she admits. ‘This is my way of dealing with it, I suppose, by keeping busy.'

He nods. ‘While the planes are here, it doesn't bother me. But as soon as the planes are gone and the ship is the only way out, I feel – ' he puts his arms around himself, hugging them to his chest ‘…It's like a prison. A pleasant prison, but it's not as if we can leave. Then again, we only have the impression of freedom in everyday life. We can't necessarily walk away, or go anywhere, either.'

‘What did you do in the pandemic?'

‘Stayed in the office. We were ordered to.' He pauses. ‘How about you?'

‘House arrest.'

‘My wife did that, although not at our flat. She stayed with friends, she couldn't bear to be on her own, so she left while she could. We didn't see each other for two months.'

Helen is preparing to give him a sympathetic look when he says, ‘It was good for us, I think. To have that time apart.'

She reins in her look and considers her options. She finds she cannot ask, why do you say that? She wonders, does she fear an answer negative or positive? Does she fear finding out that he is, after all, separated?

‘How did you manage?' he asks. ‘I mean, during that time.'

‘I try not to think about it much.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘No, it's all right. It's just – ' she cannot finish the sentence.

‘Do you have anyone – at home? I mean, you said your husband was dead – ' He falters.

‘No, I have no one.' She pauses. ‘After my husband died, I wasn't able to – well, I was able, but I had no luck.'

After Eric's death, she had been hopeful. She expected things to improve. She expected to be granted happiness, and not any happiness, either, but of an exceptional kind in direct compensation for what had happened to her.

‘No luck?'

She gives David a direct look. ‘My husband had been having an affair, for a long time. I'm not sure how long. That's why he died, because he was desperate to see her, and he left our flat. She was already sick. He caught it, and died. They died together.'

We're going to have to test you, I'm afraid. We don't know how long he had been there. She didn't know either. She didn't know how long he had been seeing another woman, from whom he had contracted the virus. She didn't know if he had passed it to her.

She lost weight instantly, while listening to what the policeman had to say on the telephone. Her trousers slacked around her waist, her hair lost its sheen. She was dying, anyway. Her stomach turned to stone. Her fingernails split, her skin hung flabby and sallow. She aged. Her first grey hairs sprouted from her head. All this happened that day, and those that followed the telephone call.

She learned that her name was Claire, a name she had never much liked, its lightness, airiness, transparency. How they had met, she would never know. After Eric died she found some photographs of her on his computer, but erased them.