The Ice Lovers (34 page)

Helen was shocked – they were all shocked – by how quickly their winter sentence had been commuted. She felt the strange dread of an unexpected imminent release. She realised that in facing an Antarctic winter she had been committed to time in a way that was new for her. Not unlike facing the pregnancy she had never had, nine months in the Antarctic would be a time to be faced down, a task. Now an empty space yawed in front of her.

They watched the ship arrive. The winterers, those who were committed to stay in any case, watched it for a while, then straggled off. Helen and the thirty-two other people who had been detained in the Antarctic stayed on the rocky outcrop, rivetted despite the wind and the cold, watching the ship pick its way among the icebergs, as if its progress depended on their gaze.

Helen had put herself down for the mooring team and she left the monument to walk down to the wharf. She stood behind three men, a rope in her hands, anchoring the slack end as the men hurled the rope onto the bow. The bar on the satellite tower swung round and round. She heard the creaking as the swell tossed it against the wharf. She watched it rise and sink, rise and sink.

There was a figure beside her, dressed in an orange boiler suit. In the darkness it took her a moment to recognise David.

‘It doesn't look real, does it?' he said.

That night they all went aboard the ship for a party in the bar. The shock of strangers, after having been with the same fifty-six people for nearly five months, was immense. They were eager for news of the outside world. Everything was normal in the Falklands, the Navy sailors assured them. Or as normal as it gets, in the Falklands, someone said. Then laughter, and the sound of forty men laughing in the same space entered her head like an explosion.

Suddenly their gear was on the ship, their cabins assigned, and she had no time to think, barely time even to return her library books, which she did at the last minute, only two hours before shore leave expired.

She went to see Gerry, the base commander, to return the books.

‘That's quite a reading pile you've got there,' he said, eyeing the covers. The Return of the Native, The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Magic Mountain.

‘I was going to take them with me,' she said. ‘But then I figured you could use them.'

He took the books. She was about to say goodbye when he spoke.

‘You know, I've been thinking about what happened that year. I wasn't on base that summer, I spent it out in the field in a couple of tents down in the Dry Valleys. But the next year I came back and I noticed that no one would speak about it. Reports were filed, but I don't know…people are superstitious. They don't like to talk about accidents or death here. They're too much of a possibility, even now.' His gaze drifted to her pile of books. ‘That novel The Magic Mountain, it's about people shut away in a sanatorium, isn't it? They stay there because they're sick.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's just what we're doing here, isn't it? The world is sick, and we're staying here because it's safe.'

‘You're staying here because you signed a contract.'

He shook his head. ‘I thought you would all be here, through the winter. Now that you're all leaving, I don't know why I'm staying here.'

‘The world's not safe, Gerry,' she said. ‘Think of that. We're going back to a terrible situation. People are dying.'

‘But it's the real world, isn't it?' Gerry looked unhappy, confused, but also elated.

He said, ‘I hope you found what you were looking for here.' He pointed to the clock. ‘You'd better go, the ship's due to sail in the morning. I'm surprised they even let you off. Navy, you know, do things by the book and all that stuff.'

‘Goodbye,' she said. ‘And good luck.'

‘Good luck yourself, out there in the cruel world.'

Leaving the Antarctic was like leaving nowhere else on earth. The winterers stood on the wharf, holding flares to keep the darknesss at bay. The leavers lined up on the deck of a ship, sailing north, into daylight, into life. Two tribes, both joined in a fraternity of loneliness. For a while, as the ship pulled away, only a few metres of water separated them and they shouted and called and gestured to each other.

But then the ship seemed to wrench itself free, and shift gear. They pulled away quickly now, turned around, and sailed out of the bay. Helen had heard it said that in the Antarctic, the departure of the ship at the beginning of winter was never a mere leave-taking, but the closing of a door called winter. Only time would prise it open.

Once clear of the sheltered peninsula waters, the seas worsened. The Navy ship had a peculiar grinding motion; like a fairground ride, it pitched, crashed, then turned around on its haunches – the ship's crew called it ‘corkscrewing'. The crew told Helen the ship was technically too small for the seas of the Drake Passage, where rogue waves were on the increase. These were waves the height of ten-storey buildings. Earlier in the season a rogue wave smashed the bridge windows out of a giant cruiseliner, and it had to be towed into port in Punta Arenas.

For the first two days everyone was seasick, apart from Helen and the crew. She wandered the ghost ship, bumping into the Bosu'n, or the chief engineer.

‘Why aren't you in your cabin throwing up?' the engineer asked.

‘I'm trying my best, but it looks like I don't get seasick.'

‘We'll put you to work, then.'

Of course – she remembered she had joined the Army. She'd better find a boiler suit that fit.

The following day David appeared. He looked wan. ‘I guess you found your sealegs.'

‘I didn't need to look for them in the first place.' In fact she'd been out on the back deck that morning, helping the Bosu'n secure cargo containers which had shifted during the night in heavy seas. When she'd finished that she'd taken an inventory of the food in the freezer for the purser. ‘A hard worker,' the crew had said, with approval, and offered her extra helpings of hot custard with dessert that night.

Later they sat alone in the mess, a bottle of wine between them, which he was not quite well enough to drink.

‘Ships are lonely places, don't you think?'

David nodded. ‘I've often thought that.'

‘I like you more when you agree with me. I try not to, of course.'

He smiled, an open, honest smile, in which she could see the shadow of his relief.

The journey back is mostly in darkness. On their trip into the Antarctic nearly seven months before, they had run past the edge of night into a perpetual daylight. Now, in June, there is only a day-long dusky light. Some people never appear from their bunks. The Navy doctor makes cabin visits, accompanied by a saline drip. Slowly, Helen and David are joined by one or two seasickness survivors. But by then they are used to having the ship to themselves, it has become their ship.

All night they talk, or sit on the bridge together, watching as snow is driven against the windows, marvelling at how it looks like fireworks, lit from underneath by the ship's powerful searchlights. Growlers scrape against the hull, the seas mount and slacken.

Helen tells David what she has learned in the Antarctic about the rules of vision. There are twenty-four basic geometric shapes. The easiest shapes for the human eye to perceive are those that are closed, such as circles and squares. The more basic the shape, the easier it is to perceive, she tells him; we see circles first then squares, then rectangles. We need to look at complicated shapes longer. The brain assembles these shapes into patterns, and compares them with patterns it has seen before; mostly these are stored in long-term memory. If you have grown up with trees, then the mind wanders across the white plain, looking for them.

In the Antarctic, during a whiteout, the human eye sees a visual field without any shapes or contours. Visible light is distributed perfectly evenly. Caught in this field of vision, the human starts to lose balance and coordination almost immediately. Quickly – within fifteen minutes – blindness, although temporary, follows.

In this white blindness the hallucinations begin. The brain begins to fabricate something to see: shapes, rectangles, circles, trees, a horizon – anything will do. Then vertigo arrives. Then, the only thing to do is close your eyes and imagine yourself upright in this white diffuse maelstrom of directionless light.

Outside the panoramic windows on the bridge a hostile sea roils into being – mountains of steel water, horizontal snow. Cape petrels dart on updrafts, hunting for krill in the wake. David spends hours looking out at the sea, which is too stern to be beautiful, but yet it is.

He wonders if everyone has an obstacle in their lives, so immovable and permanent, even after it has been dislodged. For Helen, it is the death of her husband – or not quite his death, but how he died, under what circumstances. For his great-grandfather, it was those days on Elephant Island. He wonders if you could call these obstacles destiny.

Kate cannot have children. His particular branch of his great-grandfather's survival genes stop with him. Not that this is the reason for his distress, for the mounting grind within his heart, so painful that sometimes he fears he will have a heart attack.

He practices saying it to himself, out loud: I might have to leave you. Then, I will leave you. Thank God for the Antarctic, for its dangerous seas and even more dangerous interior. He thinks, no one who has not been here can understand its bizarre allure. I am leaving you. Blue, white, blue, white. Unlit rows and rows of the ice desert. Chunks, loaves gone wrong. A white current. Cloud. The moon sweeping the icefield, a silver glaze. The mistakes he has made, errors of judgement and the heart. All those talks he has attended, and conferences, and meetings, on the future and destiny of the polar regions at the Royal Society, the Geographical Society. Long, learned faces in the audience, he cannot imagine any of these people laughing, shouting, clapping, hugging each other, having sex. All his life, he has been fascinated by cold, and there has been so little warmth. He wants to live, before it is too late. This is all he wants.

In the narrow cabin bed Helen runs her hands through David's hair.

To the south, near the Pine Island glacier, the ice is fastening. Soon its scrawl will interlock, and rebuff the sun once more.

There are so many kinds of ice that exist in the world: ice clouds, ice vapour. Icebergs, ice mountains, ice plateaus. Then the sea ice: ice floes, pack ice, pancake ice, grease ice, undersea ice, rotten ice, ice ridges, ice hummocks. An ice planet, in the process of melting. What will it be like, to live in a world without ice? The white warp gone, the mirror gone. The earth and its hot oceans, dense with methane. The conversation between the ice and the sun is both an acknowledgement, and a rebuff. But soon the conversation may be over.

4

In a good ice year, the sea ice freezes to the thickness of a man's torso. Sealed in this winter cauldron live killer whales, seals, the giant sea-sponges and starfish Nara studied that year on base. Not only could these creatures survive in the near-frozen water of the Antarctic, they flourished. But the water was warming rapidly, and the animals were dying.

On the horizon she sees the strain of night and fire. Cities burning, far away on desert shores, torched by Romans, or some dead army. A dream within a dream.

Where the cold river of wind meets warmer seas, snowspouts – miniature ice tornadoes, also called Ice Devils – and sea fog, also known as sea-smoke, form. A haze hangs on the rim of her senses.

She is puzzled, wary, cold. The wind has died in the place where the wind is born. A bluish silence billows in and out of the ice, borne on this frozen wind.

Night snags on day. Shadows increase. The pillage of light by darkness.

Nara drifts among bergs, rolling and floating like stricken ships. She could climb aboard them, if she chose. Weddell seals eye her, unalarmed by her presence. In their eyes is moist indifference. They want only to swim, eat fish, loll on ice floes, soak up the solar burn of the polar sun.

The wind slams into her body, curves it into a small pine like those stunted bonsai shrubs called Diddle-dee that she and Alexander had seen on their walks in the Falkland Islands. On the horizon a glimmer of persimmon light vanishes into a dark water sky.

Nara thinks, if I can never touch flesh again, never hear the heartbeat of another human, then please let me go. She talks to this thing which has her life in the palm of her hand, addressing it in capital letters: You, It. She wonders, who are You? A will is imprisoning her there, on the ice. It is a mysterious force. A black wall, shimmering in the whiteness: magic. Alexander has the same quality, now, when she thinks of him. He is an amulet, a statue. He transports himself through time, he barely needs to move across space. Like a moving target on a radar screen, she cannot track his every moment, only his trajectory.

The body endures longer than she expects. The first immersion is a lurching shock. Her heart rocks sideways in her chest. She breathes in desperate gulps, her brain suddenly starved of the oxygen that has deserted it in order to try to warm the extremities. She can't move her limbs; she is a diver, a strong swimmer, but her arms are made of lead suddenly, and they sink.

Her life has been the same as any other: years of striving punctuated by fleeting moments of exhilaration, of enlightenment. Fear has hung heavier over her life than most, just like the mantle of Antarctic clouds which drop so low that the sky is only a sliver of light on the horizon, trapped between cloud and sea.

It is more than a year since she has been warm. Still, some part of her does not want to let go.

The sea ice congeals in giant pancakes; it bunches into ridges where the plates of ice have driven against each other, much the same as when continental plates grind mountain chains into being when they collide. Above her, in this empty quadrant of sky at the bottom of the planet seen by only a chosen few, are nebulae and supernovae, with their bursts of strange red flare. The stars are cold, the space between them dark caesuras.