The Surfacing (44 page)

Back at the boat Morgan got the rum keg and poured. Somehow he felt he'd earned it.
He was on his third drink when DeHaven arrived. Morgan watched him help himself,
then raise his cup as for toast or celebration.

Well, he said, that's that nonsense settled for good. As I always say, nothing like
a gun-barrel in the mouth to clear a man's mind.

Morgan made no remark. I used to hope he might consider me a friend, he would write
later. Since leaving the ship, somehow that hope had drained away. I naively supposed
that by quiet attention, and by my own uncomplaining example, I might gain the man's
confidence and respect, that the immediate presence of qualities he himself sorely
lacked
might prove a positive influence. Morgan wondered why, and for whom, he wrote
such elegant lies. He had merely wanted Cabot to work and obey, and not complain.
Until now he thought he'd managed the man rather well.

The noise was neat but dull, and soon smothered by the dumb horizons. It was the
sound of a single shot.

Someone go quick, Morgan said. See what the fool is after doing to himself.

No one moved.

You, he told DeHaven. You're the one was cheering him on.

DeHaven began to button his coat. Knowing Cabot, he's probably missed, he told the
tent.

About three minutes later, DeHaven came strolling back. They were all waiting outside.

Well, he said, I stand corrected. I didn't think he had the spunk.

Already they could see the birds wheeling beyond the hummocks, dropping down out
of sight, lifting up again, carrying the precious flesh away. Only Daly did not look
up. He was greasing his leather, and apparently deeply taken with the task.

Mr Daly, Morgan said, would you please go and cover him up, quickly. Take the sail,
the groundsheet, whatever you need.

They watched Daly rummaging in the boat.

What are we going to do with do with it? DeHaven said, when Daly was gone.

It?

The body.

Cabot, you mean?

I mean Cabot's body. His mortal remains.

I don't think I understand your question.

Well, I presume we can't eat it. That would never do. We ate every one of the dogs,
but we can't lay a finger on him, on it.

He's not a dog, Morgan said.

Unfortunately.

This is Cabot you're talking about.

I know, DeHaven said. Good fresh meat, that's perfectly fine for the birds to feast
on, but not a starving man.

We're not starving yet.

No, but we very soon will be. And even then we couldn't touch it, you're right. And
why? Because certain ladies and certain gentlemen in London, if ever they got word
of it, might disapprove. What a world we live in.

That's the world you're rushing back to, Morgan said.

DeHaven sighed grandly. Well, he said, we should at least post a man out there with
the rifle. It might well draw in a bear.

The others walked out after Daly, to have a look. Morgan lingered in the tent. The
stench there was sickening. For weeks now the faces had been black with grease. God
knows what they would become without me, he thought. Bit by bit, he began to fling
Cabot's gear out onto the ice. As though it somehow smelled worse than the rest.
A spare shirt, a spare collar – the man had brought a collar! – mittens, boot-hose.
He would have to burn the man's letters before the others got their hands on them.
He turned up Cabot's sack and shook everything out. Everywhere his mind turned, it
was ready to understand. He might have helped, he supposed. Of course there was no
helping someone like that. Still, he could not quite manage to condemn the man, except
the inconvenience. It was nothing he had not many times thought of for himself.

When he was done he went to check the parcel. Approaching, he lifted his gun and
fired into the air, to frighten off the birds. It was like a pillow exploding. He
stood over it awhile. He did not know where the men had gone. All around he could
hear the ice at work. The real world wasting away. A few feet ahead of him, he watched
a long tongue of ice politely detach itself from the main. It touched the surface
and slid under with a stifled laugh, like a doused torch.

The distant world made a very fine picture indeed. But the beauty and strangeness
of it could not quite disguise the simple truth. They stood before an abyss. The
mess went on forever. Cabot was dead. Almost every promise now
seemed false. Two
months, he reminded himself. It had been a credible attempt.
Creditable
, even. He
could do whatever he wanted now.

For dinner that night they had cold pork and chocolate and made no attempt to light
the conjuror. No one was yet ready to take Cabot's place. Afterwards he watched them
making themselves comfortable, settling in. Tonight there was little chat. What's
done is done, DeHaven said.

Even had the hauling gone tolerably well, it was too narrow a calculation, leaving
the ship so late, he wrote. It was too far to ask, in such little time, in such a
landscape, of such men. However painful a concession it may be to make, we are left
with no choice but to recognize these unforgiving facts. To do so would be the bravest
action yet from men who have never once shirked – With the policy of a lacemaker,
he lifted his pen a fraction of an inch off the page. He raked the nib through what
he'd written and began again. Following a tedious sequence of privations and hardship,
in the course of which, on a thousand occasions, the company's tenacity, their humility,
and their powers of abnegation have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, we are
now obliged to concede our adversary's supremacy. That concession made, it would
be both foolish and useless to persist longer with our current plan. In my opinion
the only proper course of action is now to retreat to the ship. We have given our
all, and for the present must agree to trade hope for patience.

He put up his pen again. There was perhaps too much resignation in it, too much failure,
and he knew well the thing was more complicated than that.

2nd August

Out there, Morgan said, there's a certain line.

The famous line, DeHaven said. I thought we'd already reached it. I thought that's
why we stopped.

What I mean is, beyond a certain point, you can't change your mind anymore. You lose
that luxury. You can't just turn about and come back.

Dick, I went with you to Beechey. I know as well as anyone where it goes. Banes too,
and Daly. And we're all ready to face it. Doesn't that tell you anything?

And what about Tommy? What about Kitty? It's not just our own lives we're playing
with now.

The rules have changed, DeHaven said. As though they had merely stepped from one
court onto another, to play a different game.

Every man for himself now, is that it?

It was a pure miracle she ever got so far north, DeHaven said. You know well she'll
never again sail.

Perhaps next year, Morgan said.

Why would next year be any better? Why not worse?

Possibly, Morgan said.

So you'll trek south as far as you can, then trek all the way back to the ship, again?

If I have to.

And how many times are you going to do that?

As many times as I have to.

You can't, DeHaven said. You can't keep doing that year after year, the rest of your
life.

Why not? Morgan said.

It was still early morning, but already the day was glaring, severe. The dream was
gone. The sun drenched everything in its brilliant, bitter logic. Under their feet,
the ice was sizzling incessantly. They were standing at the edge of the floe. Against
bears, Morgan had brought the gun.

A return to the ship is not necessarily a concession of defeat, I told him, Morgan
wrote. It is merely deferring hope, not
abandoning it. It is reserving our energies
for something less heroic, and more likely to succeed. I implored him to consider
the matter from that perspective. In the stores, I reminded him, not counting what
we might shoot, at full rations we still had sufficient for two full years. Tinned
meat. Tinned fruit. The very best preserves. Chocolate and jam. Beer and spirits
and wine. You saw the way we were living before we came out, I said. How bad would
it be?

A cheap enough ransom, if you ask me, for a year or two years of a man's life, DeHaven
said. A few spoonfuls of jam, a few tins of salt meat. He looked north. The horizon
there was still a little troubled. Everywhere else it was clear, clean day. It's
not the food or the cold is killing me, he said. It's this endless waiting. Whatever's
out there, why not at least walk out to meet the damned thing head-on?

Look at them, Morgan told him. Look at me. The evidence was there for all to see.
The grey hair. The grey faces. The bodies thin like never before.

But it was no good argument. Trumping everything, from the tent came the wicked smell
of warm chocolate. It was the old world calling. DeHaven took a good deep breath
of it and held it in.

What about Tommy? Morgan said. It had always seemed DeHaven was fairly fond of the
boy. This was as close to pleading with him as I could in dignity allow myself, he
wrote afterwards. If ever the child fell ill, I told him, I would not know what to
do.

He's your son, DeHaven said. Your charge, not mine.

My charge? Morgan said. The pronunciation seemed difficult. His skin was tingling,
tight, no longer fit. The gun was too heavy in his hands.

They stood listening to what sounded like the fussing of fat in a hot pan. It came
from the edge of the floe.

All I want, DeHaven said, is to make a decent shove for it. To give myself that chance.
Instead of sitting around here like a fugitive, waiting to starve or freeze to death.

You want to walk all the way home, is that it? Morgan
said. Just point your nose
in vaguely the right direction and keep going on sheer bloody-mindedness. Keep putting
one foot in front of the other, and hop across the cracks?

Exactly.

Morgan could not see if the man was smiling. The beards now masked almost every hint
of humanity, good or ill.

And the boat? Morgan said.

The boat is what's holding us back. We take what we can carry, no more.

And when you come to open water? You're planning to swim?

It hasn't helped us cross much water so far. It's been more of a brake than anything.

Morgan took a step closer to the edge, touched the barrel tip to the surface, to
test it. He lifted his left leg an inch off the ground. The ice under his right foot
began to cede, with a vulgar sucking sound.

The thing is physically impossible, Morgan said. The state of the ice. The state
of the men. I know it and you know it. The thing simply cannot be done. You do know
that, don't you?

No I don't.

And when there are no more floes, what will you do? When it's young ice like this,
or no ice at all. You'll walk across the water, is it? Like Jesus himself? You and
your disciples? All the way to Melville?

Yes, DeHaven said. If that's what it takes. Yes.

Morgan was staring down at his own boots, apparently shy or unsure. Inside those
boots, his feet had finally shrunk again to something approaching a normal size.

Go on, then, he said.

Close along the edge, the new ice looked like unpolished glass. Farther out it shone
more brilliantly, in places seemed almost wet. The thing was too well painted. It
looked like a perfect match.

Morgan lifted the gun and pointed it at DeHaven's face, and nodded at the lake of
young ice before them.

Go on, he said. Now's your chance, once and for all, to make me shut my mouth. Back
on the floe, wreaths of snow-dust like spun sugar were lifting into the air. DeHaven
stood at the edge, with Morgan just behind him, and the gun in-between. He cocked
the wing. The sound of it was very clear. He shifted his weight to his front foot,
pushing the barrel right up against DeHaven's teeth, and as he did so DeHaven's hands
came up to save himself. But Morgan jabbed the tip hard at the face, and sent him
sprawling backward.

DeHaven stood at the edge, the tip of his fingers at his bloodied lip.

One foot in front of the other, Morgan said. That's how you start and that's how
you go on.

DeHaven slid his foot onto the young ice. He shuffled forward, several yards. Stood
there swaying slightly, like a drunk. He twisted his head to look back. But Morgan
too had stepped out from the edge, and was closing in again.

Since morning the ice had been basking in the sun and in places was now glossed with
a slick film. Still DeHaven inched his way forward. Every now and then he glanced
over his shoulder, to check was Morgan still following, still pointing the gun. Morgan
tracked him through the sights, and tried his best to keep up. Any moment he expected
the man to disappear, as through a conjuror's trap. He did not. He was there still,
far out, ever farther ahead, trying to get out of range or trying to draw him on.

Morgan's own boots sloshed along like a mop on a flooded floor. Beneath them, he
felt the ice working to take his weight. In the end he slowed and stopped and stood
watching the miracle. A lone man, far from the edge, walking on water. Under that
distant figure, sea and sky rippled and shone, silver and blue.

In the mirror under him was a world muddled and bled. He watched the dream settle,
resolve. He saw the choices made. They seemed so simple now, so obvious. He squatted
down, drew out his knife. It went right to the handle, like a skewer
into a hot cake.
He didn't dare draw it out again. He didn't dare move. He was trying to think, and
trying to breathe. He was waiting for the terror to drain away. The ice under him
was as rotten as damp card and had no good reason to bear his weight.