When Nights Were Cold (9 page)

I have a photograph, a long, curled-up thing. I unroll it, grasp the corners. I move my arms back and forth to get it into a position where I can read the words on the back.

There are more names but too faded to read.

Catherine will not want to see this. She was never interested in hockey or anything to do with running around. I imagine that she and George had a quiet life together. I have the feeling that she is thinking about me at this very moment. If I shut my eyes and concentrate, I believe I can almost reach her thoughts and pull them to me. I want to believe that I can. We used to play at this sort of thing, reading minds and sending messages. Once I sat in my bedroom, Catherine in hers, and we imagined Freddie into the attic so that the three of us could have a conversation by telepathy. I thought I heard a lot of noise from both of them but nothing that sounded like voices and, though I wanted it to be true and longed to hear words from Freddie, I knew that it was nonsense.

Catherine. Catherine. Can you hear me? Where are you? Listen and you'll know I'm here and have something to tell you. Cicely Parr – she – you never met her but I'm trying to explain. I can't get rid of her. I need you at my side now.

Chapter Seven

The Antarctic Exploration Society held its first meeting. I woke early and spent an hour before chapel preparing my speech. I skipped tea in the afternoon to give myself another hour. By the evening I was in knots, unable to breathe without my ribs hurting, and had to spend some time at the mirror talking to myself. Perhaps, if it went well, I would write a letter to my father and tell him what I had done. He might yet forgive me for leaving home and be proud that I was continuing the journey we had begun together by the fireplace.

But when I put my nose through the classroom door and saw Cicely Parr sitting at the front, rolling a pencil back and forth on her desk, my courage seeped away. It had not occurred to me that Parr might be interested either in the Antarctic or in anything I had organized. She wore a grey skirt and a cream blouse that made her skin appear yellowish. Her chin jutted out as though she were already bored, even slightly disgusted, by the whole meeting, though it had not even begun.

There was one other attendee, Winifred Hooper, a quiet, bespectacled botany student, who sat at the desk behind Parr's and gave me a shy smile as I entered. On fine days Hooper would perch on an upturned basket on one of the long balconies, making garlands of primroses to thread through the balustrade. She had a peaceful air and seemed absorbed as she worked away in the sunshine. I knew little more about her, except that she had a fiancé – a medical student at Cambridge – and was only at college to pass the time until he qualified as a doctor. If he succeeded before she took her finals, she would not bother to complete her degree. I had heard her say this quite happily to a friend one teatime and I was surprised and inclined not to like her for it, but now, in my gratitude, I forgot all that.

I took a seat beside Parr and suggested that we might wait for more people before I declared the meeting open and announced the agenda. We sat in uncomfortable silence for five or ten minutes. Parr stared out of the window, though there was nothing to see but sky. Hooper glanced at me a few times, still with a polite smile which I forgot to return, and drew breath once, as if to speak but not knowing what to say. My nerves were making her uneasy but I couldn't help myself. I was wringing my hands the way Mother did before guests came to tea.

The doorknob rattled.

‘Here you are.' Locke put her head into the room. ‘Drama Soc's cancelled. Miss Wheeler's gone to nurse her sick aunt and might not come back. You don't mind if I join you?'

She noticed Parr and opened her eyes wide at me. I smiled. I could do nothing else.

Locke pulled out the chair next to Parr's and behind Hooper's. She gave me an encouraging smile then turned to Parr.

‘Hello. I didn't know this was an interest of yours. Scientific, is it?'

‘Yes, more or less. I don't think anyone else will come now, so shouldn't we make a start? Farringdon, I trust you have a plan.' Meaning that she thought I did not.

‘At the Tennyson Appreciation Club they read out his poems,' offered Hooper. ‘I'm not a member but I hear it always goes very well.'

‘That's an idea,' said Locke. ‘We could—'

‘No, no,' I said, anxious that they should not take over my meeting. ‘I don't think Tennyson wrote anything about the South Pole. Let me make my opening speech. I've given it considerable thought.'

I took to the lecturer's podium with my notes, planted my feet evenly, rubbed my fingers together, for they were a little damp, and addressed the Society.

‘Welcome, ladies, to the inaugural meeting of the Candlin College Antarctic Exploration Society. Let me explain to you what our purpose shall be. In our regular weekly meetings I propose that we acquaint ourselves with the particulars of recent and current expeditions to the Antarctic. We'll read the accounts of the
Discovery
and
Nimrod
expeditions in the
South Polar Times
– and whatever else we can find – and we'll follow their routes along the map. I'm sure there will be much to consider and enjoy. You'll see that I have already marked the journey of the
Nimrod
from Hobart to McMurdo Sound.' I went to the map and pointed out the line of the voyage. ‘I have listed the equipment and men on board, so we may gain a picture of the expedition and from there we might imagine what our men endured. We may also examine the scientific studies conducted on this and on previous expeditions and think about what we can learn from them.' I held up the exercise books I had purchased the previous day. ‘These will hold the records of our meetings so we can write all our notes and observations in them. If there are no objections from the Society, I shall keep these in my sitting room. However, all members will be at liberty to borrow and use them at any time.'

The members of the Antarctic Exploration Society nodded. I cleared my throat.

‘Now,' I said, ‘the intention of this Society is not simply to learn from books in an academic manner and accept all that we hear, but to engage and, most important of all, imagine. How can we understand everything that the explorers experience unless we consider what we would do in their situation? What is it like to live in the harshest conditions that Nature can unleash?'

‘A real snorker, I'm sure,' said Hooper with a small frown. She wore a necklace, a dove of paste jewels on a silver chain, and she fiddled with the chain. ‘But how can we ever know how it feels? I'm rather interested in studying flora and fauna. I've never thought much about what it's like to be an explorer.'

‘We'll do that too,' I said. ‘Flora and fauna. Penguins, lichens, fish and all that. It will be part of the journey.'

‘We might try some play-acting,' said Locke.

‘That doesn't mean anything,' said Hooper. ‘We won't know what it is to experience frostbite, or scurvy. It's rather silly to think that we can.'

‘And this is not Drama Society.' Parr laughed as she spoke, but could not hide her scorn.

I thought of my father's hands, the deformed foot that made him limp and twist across the room, his pain and sadness.
My fingertips were like people, Grace. Each had its own character. The same applies to my foot. I often wonder where these bits of me are, as though they have gone to live somewhere else. It hurt when they left me. The physical pain does not compare.

‘This is what it is to lose part of your own body to the elements,' I said. ‘I shall describe it to you.'

I switched off the overhead light so that only a small lamp burned. The curtains were open and light from windows across the quad shone in.

‘So. Imagine.' I settled in the professor's chair and clasped my hands. ‘We are together in our tent. We have travelled for days in blizzards.'

‘Are we in the Antarctic specifically?' asked Hooper.

‘No, it doesn't matter. We could be anywhere in freezing conditions. I'm just explaining frostbite.'

Hooper sat back in her chair, unconvinced, but Locke and Parr leaned forward with glinting eyes.

‘See your fingers in the dark.' I whispered this to make them fearful. ‘You've been in the snow all day, perhaps in icy water, struggling to swim. Your gloves are hardened and you can no longer feel your fingers. They turn white, then blue. With your teeth you pull off your gloves. And – your fingertips are black.'

I glanced at the ceiling. My father huddled and shivered on a stretcher while men tended to his wounds. His face creased up in pain but he didn't cry out. A surgeon stitched up the rotten stubs of his fingers and toes. He lay flat on his bunk for the beginning of the journey home, the end of his life at sea. What did he think then? I wondered. Was he glad that he had travelled despite the accident or did he wish that he had stayed at home? Of course, he must be glad, but then it made no sense that he wanted to keep his daughters in a birdcage, never to see anything of the world except the streets they first travelled in their perambulator.

‘Frostbite's avoidable if you take care and wear soft boots,' said Parr with the manner of a slightly impatient doctor. ‘That's the best precaution. For the feet, anyway, in snow.'

I didn't know about this so I said nothing. I gave Parr a pleasant smile to show that I was grateful for her superior knowledge. Then I pressed the light switch and the tent disappeared.

Hooper twisted the necklace around her little finger, slid the dove up and down the chain.

‘I'm not sure that four women can really understand.' Her voice was both timid and sanctimonious. ‘We'll never go there or anywhere near. We wouldn't survive a minute in the blizzards.'

‘What do you mean?' asked Parr. ‘Do you think women get colder than men? Not as cold?'

‘No. Well, perhaps, yes. We're not as strong.'

‘I've climbed mountains and crossed glaciers,' said Parr. ‘And I've done it just as well as men, sometimes better. I can assure you that our bodies don't disintegrate in bad weather. Well, no faster than men's bodies.'

‘Where did you climb, Parr, in the Alps?' I wanted to clap and cheer at this extraordinary revelation.

‘My aunt and uncle visit Switzerland every year and I usually go with them. It's what my family have always done and I've been climbing now since I was about twelve or thirteen years old.'

‘And you've climbed on ice and snow?'

‘Many times. It's rather fun, if you're good at it.' She smiled, a crack that opened across her face and sealed over almost as soon as it was there.

‘How wonderful.'

‘I can easily imagine you out in the wilderness.' Locke smiled, possibly with sarcasm, but I think that even Locke was impressed by Parr that evening.

‘I can thrive both in the wilderness and in captivity.' Parr smiled back with a shrug. ‘We all can.'

If, by captivity, Parr meant her rooms at college, then she could have no idea what stifling places many of us had left behind and to which we would return.

Cicely Parr could whack the hockey ball from one end of the pitch to the other, run faster than most of us and never slip or fall. Though tall, she seemed to take up little space as she moved. There was a toughness to her physique and manner which sometimes made me think that she was bred from some superior species, something more than human, and she always had her eye on some high, distant place. I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that she was a mountaineer. It was easy enough to picture and made perfect sense. And yet it made no sense at all, I thought, with her views on suffrage. A woman who climbed mountains with men must surely want the right to vote.

I felt admiration for Parr and a little envy. I wished she had mentioned the Alps before I started lecturing on frostbite and hypothermia.

‘Will you go to the Alps next year?' I asked her.

‘I expect so. I usually do.'

‘I can't imagine any such thing in my family. We walked on the Downs but I've never been on a mountain, not with snow and ice . . .' My voice trailed off. It was too soon to invite myself to the Alps with Parr, but already I was thinking what a lucky friendship this might be.

‘Indeed. Well, my parents were killed in an accident on the Titlis in Switzerland, you see. They were excellent climbers, quite famous in the mountaineering world, and my father was a member of the Alpine Club, but they got caught in a storm on their descent and fell from a cornice. My father went first and my mother wasn't quick enough to anchor the rope. She flew off the edge right after him and that was that. In the Alps you can't often change your mind if you make a mistake.'

Parr related this in a matter-of-fact tone. It sounded like a joke, a wry comment on her parents' carelessness. I was horrified.

‘And you were just a little girl?'

‘I was seven years old. It's why I love the Alps.'

Why didn't she hate them? But her eyes hooded over and her lips were firmly together. She had nothing more to say.

Locke, Hooper and I adjourned to Locke's room for cocoa. ‘She is much more than I thought,' I said to Locke.

‘I expect glaciers form under her gaze, avalanches hear her hard voice and turn straight back up the mountain.'

‘She's not as bad as you think. She wants to belong, but she doesn't know how. And we must all try to get along if this is to be a success.'

‘Of course. For you, Farringdon, I shall like Cicely Parr. I'll do my best. It's just so difficult to feel comfortable while she's in the room and I don't really know why.'