The Surfacing (19 page)

He crawled into the tent, and Morgan followed.

You need a new maid, he said, when he saw the wreckage.

Well, Morgan said, it's just impossible to get good help these days.

The men were standing just outside, could hear everything. Morgan asked him what
he would like to drink. He had made his decision instantly. He had no way of forcing
him to go back, and out here he could not risk having an order refused.

What are my options? DeHaven wanted to know.

Well, just at the moment I'm afraid my cellar is a little understocked. He rooted
out a bottle from one of the bags. The label says cognac but it's lamp oil. You can
have that or you can have rum.

I'll have whatever you're having, DeHaven said.

A wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Grog all round then. Bien corsés, as Cabot says,
and to be honest I think I prefer the French notion of straight-laced to our own.

One by one the men were crawling back inside. It was too cold to stay standing out
there for long. Morgan lit the conjuror himself. DeHaven stretched his hands towards
the flame.

That day it was almost eleven o'clock before they packed up the tent. Banes had begun
to complain again, louder than ever, for DeHaven's sake. Alone, Morgan would have
let him suffer, but did not interfere now as DeHaven saw to his eyes – rinsed them
and wrapped them up. Afterwards, Morgan told Banes to rig up beside him, at wheel.
Today he rigged them in unicorn, and put DeHaven in lead, the hardest slot.

They watched Cabot wriggle out over the ice, down on his belly, arms by his side.
The others crouched behind the sledge, Petersen ready with the gun. She came across
the floes at a fearless stroll. Neither paused nor hurried, nor acknowledged her
admirers in any way. The frost-smoke lay in loose bales beyond her.

Just as Petersen had told him to do, Cabot kept honking, wobbling, flapping his elbows.
And still she came steady and straight. And still no one said a word. Finally they
heard Petersen's hammer cocked – a smart, elegant sound. She hoisted up onto her
hind legs, pompously sniffed the air. Then turned and set off in a blundering run,
back the way she'd come.

At lunch, he watched Cabot eat. In his tin was a small lump of mush. Cabot prodded
it with his fork for some sign of life. He put a forkful in his mouth but didn't
bother to chew, didn't swallow. It was in there, slowly melting. Morgan sat opposite.

I still say we should have shot the seal, DeHaven said.

They say it tastes very like man-flesh, said Morgan.

Mix it up with a tin of soup, you wouldn't know the difference.

One less mouth to feed, Morgan said. Now that we have a mouth extra.

Less matter to haul.

More space in the tent.

A bigger share of the prize.

And what better proof, to those at home, of the extent our trials?

Still Cabot showed no sign he heard.

Sighting that tiny fleck in the far distance, Morgan had been fearful. His first
thought was that someone had been sent to call him back, to prevent him from leaving
her behind. Hearing DeHaven's voice, he had been relieved, and the relief had surged
through him as the fear had, through the selfsame channels, showing him what he had
refused to see clearly until then, that part of him did not want to return. Perhaps
it was because he secretly wished to do the same that he had not immediately condemned
DeHaven for abandoning the ship, for wanting to push on with them to Beechey, and
remain there.

The advantages were too obvious to push from his mind. But it was hard to see how
it could be managed with five other men at hand, for witnesses. He would not know
how to explain it. He barely dared explain it to himself, the thing was so simple.
He did not want to go back to her, that was all. He did not want to be present when
it arrived, for her to hand it over, the debt he could never discharge. He had not
asked her to follow him. That was not what he'd come out here for. That was not the
trial he'd planned.

He wondered in what way precisely he would be misunderstood, what would be the terms
of the judgment, if he did not return. The worst they could say, of course, would
be that he'd been using her – it – as an excuse, a chance to escape the hardship
of a long winter in the ice. That would be the most ingenuous version, and the most
cruel. He did not think he could stand it. The mere thought of it was a challenge
to go back, regardless of all the promises calling him to Beechey.

The day was bright again. Today he rigged them in unicorn, with Banes in lead. Leading,
you could not merely blink your eyes open now and then and feel a way with your feet.

All day they pulled towards the Devon Island shore. Three times they watched Banes
stumble and fall, and each time Morgan had to grab hold of Daly's arm, to stop him
helping the man to his feet. With the wind in their faces, they scraped
all the way
to Cape Osborn, the nearest point of the Devon shore. By evening, Banes's eyes were
swollen shut. They propped him against the cliff and unwrapped the head. On each
side of the nose, the tears had trickled into his beard and frozen in a little lump.

In the tent, he watched DeHaven dribbling the spoon into the blind man's mouth. The
lips were shrivelled and cracked like old varnish in the sun. Afterwards, they put
him into the blanket bag, in a hood.

Unwrapped, the other faces too were anguished, sorrowful, yearning – seemed less
in physical than in moral or mental pain. Inches from their heads, the tent was rattling
frantically. Outside, the grumbling ice. Legs folded under him tailor-fashion, Morgan
hunched over his bowl. He was studying them secretly, his slaves.

The cold tunnelled through to him early. It was Sunday. Overhead, glazed with breath,
the canvas was frozen stiff. It was a wedge driven into the wilderness, with walls
that were wafer-thin.

After breakfast, as it began to brighten, he left the tent. From the top of the headland,
he named the points north and south. He named the capes and the inlets, and the tiny
islands, some that were little more than rocks. Others had always named such things
after fellow officers and ice-masters, retired captains, sponsors, the Lords Commissioners
of the Admiralty. The lights and shadows they wished to walk in. But Morgan named
them after his wife, and his wife's sister, his mother and his father, his dead cousin,
his favourite dog. His forgetful friends, his first wound, his first whore. He was
bringing them out here with him, and finally fixing them in a definite place, from
where they could no longer follow.

Had the lost expedition travelled this far north, up this particular channel, he
wrote – He wondered how best to state his case. There were certain conclusions he
had to avoid, try not even to steal a glimpse at them. In their place, he would have
left some definite sign of his passage, and would have
left it precisely where he
was standing, here, the highest point for miles. There was nothing, of course.

From Cape Osborn they would now haul round to the north. Those were Captain Myer's
orders, he reminded them – to haul round to the north and inspect the adjacent bay,
about which Captain Myer entertained some considerable hope, that it might in fact
be a passage back east to Jones's Sound, and the head of Baffin Bay, from whence
they had come.

I'm impressed, DeHaven said. You're already on short supplies, you've an extra man
to feed, and now you're going to stretch yourself even further for that fool? Chapeau.
He was blindfolding Banes with a length of boot-hose. You haul straight down the
Channel for godsake, write it up how you like in your journal, and who'll ever be
any the wiser?

The idea was tempting, but Morgan did not yet want to turn south. Turning north,
he was putting his decision off.

If you want to go south, go south, I'm not going to stop you. That's why you came
out here, isn't it? Morgan said. DeHaven, he knew, could not reply. With no tent,
no heat, and no supplies, he would not last two days.

How many searchers have been lost, down through the years? DeHaven asked him, straight
out.

A great many.

More than the number of those they were searching for?

Undoubtedly, Morgan said. He thought of his heroes. Franklin, Parry, Ross. Many was
the night he'd turned the pages, sifting through their torments, their failures,
that he hoped to rival with his own.

And what did it ever get them? DeHaven had asked. All their backbreaking labour and
all their lost fingers and toes?

Morgan did not know what to say. He did not know why, even now, away from the ship
and everyone in it, within safe sledging distance of Beechey, he wanted once again
to veer north. He did not know why so many men had come to chasten themselves so
high up in the world.

They had a hefty breakfast of tea and rum and pemmican. They had provisions remaining
for twenty-two days. North of the headland the flat beach stretched as far as the
eye could see. Every mile or so a line of rubble ran straight out from the land.

It was the 24th of October. All night long the wind had been roaring over the beach,
sweeping everything off the surface, hosing it horizontal. They lay there in the
dusk, smoking their pipes, murmuring conspiracies. Banes in silence, behind his mask.
DeHaven seemed to be asleep.

How does it look? Cabot asked. There had been another lull.

Once more Morgan poked the glass through the flap. This time it snagged on what looked
like the ghost of a cairn, far to the north. He made the mistake of telling them
what he saw. Then watched Daly begin to bother himself with hope. Who else could
have made it, Daly said, but the men they were searching for? Morgan could not contradict
him. If cairn it be, its appeal was made directly to them, the searchers – first
imagined, afar; now real, and so close.

The conjuror was lit for their midday meal. The heat woke DeHaven. Morgan watched
the steam come off the man. He watched Petersen picking at his ear, and admiring
the extract. Outside, the scouring was merciless. They had half an hour to kill,
waiting for the food to thaw and warm. Waiting, they watched DeHaven rigging little
lengths of wire to two bones he'd found at their last campsite, what looked like
the upper and lower parts of a jaw.

Some species of whale, he said. Stiffly, he closed the contraption, with a decorous
clack.

With teeth? Morgan said.

There are whales with teeth. Petersen will tell you. Tell him, Chinaman.

There are whales with teeth, Petersen said.

Each bone held a long neat row of them, tiny as a baby's, but razor-sharp.

The pelvis, DeHaven told them. That's the key. The keyhole, if you prefer. He set
the jawbones yawning on his lap. He held aloft one of the bread bags, queerly stuffed
and tied. Head up, head down. Back to front, back to back. Those are the possibilities,
he said. He was gently wrestling with the doll. Head down and back to front would
be best, he said, for mother and child alike.

Morgan wondered had he done anything to deserve an alternative. He could not say.
He did not know how he registered on that particular scale.

DeHaven was holding the doll against his torso. Below, the open jawbones lay waiting
on his lap. To DeHaven, apparently, the thing was going to be ridiculously easy,
ridiculously fast. In his other hand he was holding pink leggings of some kind. The
cloth was thin and quite elastic, ready to stretch to almost any size. They watched
him pull it up over the head.

The uterus, DeHaven said, drawing it up over the body, inch by inch. It's like any
other muscle, he said. It stretches and it contracts. That's what pushes the baby
down. He bunched the loose end in his fist and began to squeeze, like a pâtissier
piping cream. The dilation of the cervix
allows
it, he said. The contractions
oblige
it, if you will.

He had put the head into the open jaws. They watched in silence as the doll was piped
through. To Morgan this was merely a puppet-show, a bundle of rags bumping against
bare bone. There was no flesh, there could be no tearing, no bleeding, no pain. DeHaven
had spread his legs a little, the jaws gaping on his lap. Once the head is through,
he said, the midwife will normally assist in the extraction first of one shoulder,
then the other. He reached his hand down outside his leg, and up under it, to take
hold of the head.

The midwife, Morgan said. Or the doctor.

If the lady concerned happens to have a certified physician attending her, she can
count herself extremely fortunate, DeHaven said.

The head, he kept saying. The cervix. The shoulders. The
uterus. They sounded like
specimens, each in their own separate jar.

The hand that had reached up between his legs to catch the doll now pulled it through,
brought it back around and sat it on his lap. It had been a quick and simple birth,
apparently, taking only the time needed to describe it.

If it's so simple, why does it so often go so wrong? Morgan said.

The great difficulty is the size of the head, DeHaven said. I mean, in relation to
the size of the pelvis.

The shark's mouth.

The whale's mouth. Exactly. Some women's hips are simply not big enough.

What about Kitty? She's not exactly the biggest woman in the world.

I've seen worse. I've seen worse that have got away with it.

And if the hole, the gap, whatever you want to call it –

The passage.

If it just isn't big enough?

If that's the case, there's no point whatsoever in trying to force the issue. It's
merely a great deal of time and effort wasted, DeHaven said.

The day passed. Again and again he undid the tie and slid the glass through the gap,
hoping for a better view of the cairn to the north. It was a useless temptation.
The wind was coming on harder than ever now, and there seemed no hope of ever again
getting away. They would lie here calmly and dumbly, he told himself, and let themselves
be frozen, or slowly buried alive. As always, his mind was rushing ahead, to catastrophe.
These were his last companions, it told him, in his final home.