The Still Point (19 page)

For the first weeks, they made good progress. They were fortunate: the
weather stayed clear, the ice for the most part passable. The sleds crossed easily over narrow gullies when they came to them. They covered nine or ten miles on a good day, trudging on over uneven patches, hauling the sleds where the dogs could not pull them, speaking little to keep their breath in the thin air. Careful not to exert themselves too much, for despite the ever-encroaching sun it was bitterly cold, and sweat freezes at such temperatures; but always moving enough to keep warm. They rested twice only in ten hours of marching, for only five minutes’ pause each time, stamping up and down and clutching chocolate in awkward mittens to stave off the cold. The ache of every limb, of thighs and arms and across their shoulders when at last they bedded down, made their relished sleep as deep and heavy as that of exhausted children.

The tent they carried was made of silk, lightweight and strong, round, and large enough to accommodate a stove at the centre, and the six of them in three double sleeping bags — the advantage of shared body heat having long since overcome any English regard for privacy. Freely and Edward were old bedfellows; Hugh Compton-Hill, the diplomat’s son, was paired at first with Nordahl but found the mild Dr Wilkinson more tolerant of a squirming, muttering sleeper — truth be told, the good doctor was reminded of his wife, and after months alone in a narrow bunk which had seemed to him luxuriously wide was oddly comforted to have his nights again disturbed. And so Nordahl and Andreev, both large but stolid men, squeezed into the last bag and lay flat on their backs together like kings on a marble tomb, as if cast from the monument they deserved but would not, alas, receive. This was Edward’s team of brave men — and the boy he was compelled to bring with him.

Each evening, as the sun spread across the horizon, the day’s march was called to a halt and the tent assembled, the white silk like the snow bathed
crimson. They made it fast, secured the sleds while Andreev tended the dogs, and on a clear night could be snug inside within forty minutes. They climbed into their bags and waited for their clothes to thaw — stiff with ice, they cracked and squeaked as they flexed their limbs and it took an hour or more to warm themselves. When they could move again, they set about preparing supper; the simple, repetitive bill of canned and reheated fare seemed manfully spartan after
Persephone
’s lavish spreads. At night they slept in their wet clothes, drying the sodden wool lining of their boots with their own body heat, laid like compresses on the chest, so tired they barely felt discomfort.

 

The days were varied only by the changing consistencies of light and snow, the lowering or thinning clouds, the thickness of the air and the depth underfoot. Edward’s diary is a series of measures assiduously taken, the reckoning of rations and of the horizon, the scale of the ice forms that towered about them more vast than any they had seen aboard ship or had imagined, ‘great monuments and temples such as gods might toss up effortless, in their own honour’. Through it all, pride and love and the promise of triumph and return. And beginning every entry, that essential measure: how far north. Almost every day is otherwise much the same, but for that figure creeping up daily through the 80s, recorded first and foremost without fail. The priority is never forgotten, so that more exceptional events are recorded as an afterthought — on 28 March, for example: ‘85° 72’ N. We must surely reach soon the 86th parallel; we are fast covering the distance’, and also: ‘Last night we were attacked by a huge bear. None were hurt but for one of the dogs; today we have been feasting.’

The story of the bear proved a favourite with the girls. Julia’s father would
prowl about the tent, growling, and the sisters would clutch at each other laughing, terrified, needing to pee. Early versions omitted the details of the murder, but one summer, by the campfire, Aunt Helen decided they were old enough to hear it, and knew when she saw their narrow faces aghast with grisly satisfaction that her judgement, as ever, was true.

 

Edward and his men sweated and steamed in the damp heat of their own bodies in the tent, and cracked coarse jokes of which no record remains (not an appropriate legacy, thought Edward, to leave to his wife or the world). One night, Anton Andreev halted them with a raised hand. The gesture in itself was so unlike him, who rarely joined their banter with more than a bobbing, smiling laugh, that all were hushed.

‘Listen. It is Anna.’

They listened. There was no wind, no sound, only stifled breathing; no leaves beyond the window, no familiar house-creak, no night-bird’s cry. Only the endless, patient quiet of the Arctic. They grew nervous; the tent, after all, a warm little glowing circle of solidarity, was very small, very thin, very lonely. They sat rigid, spines straight with attention, for minutes like hours of silence, until Compton-Hill slumped and laughed.

‘What did she say, old boy? You’ll have to translate, you know: we don’t speak Russian — or wolfhound, for that matter.’

‘Listen,’ Andreev said again. His features seemed carved by the orange light of the stove, his eyes shining below his dark brow. And then they heard it: a whine, very faint, but distinct. And another.

‘They’re dreaming of rabbits, Anton,’ said Edward, to calm his men, feeling their fear creep over his scalp.

‘No. They are not sleeping.’

Edward held the Russian’s gaze. ‘No,’ said Edward. As carefully as he could in the cramped space, he slid himself out of the sleeping bag, staying Freely as he did so but motioning Andreev to step out with him. And then, crashing through the silence, the barking started; a furious frightened din, alarmingly close to them. In the tent, the men froze. Edward and Andreev’s eyes met and they began to move with quiet speed, pulling on boots and loading rifles. They heard the clamour subdued to a growl as they unlaced the tent. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light afforded by the new moon’s sliver, they saw the clear line of savagery, from the straining leashes through the slavering pack, long snouts all low-snarling at the point where a dark trail across the snow ended. A bare twenty yards off, the poor carcass of one of their number was still pinned by a pair of massive claws. As the men emerged, the bear raised its bloodied muzzle for a moment before deciding there was time enough and returning, placid, to his feast. They were close enough to hear the soft grunts, the rip of gristle. Close enough for a good clean shot.

Bear meat is a delicacy relished by all who venture far enough to taste it. Andreev mourned for the dead hound, Yerik, an old friend; but it may be that revenge lent his supper that night an especially sweet savour.

 

In early April a light snow began to fall; the air closed in upon them and thickened to a pale bright grey as dense as the snow beneath their feet, so that they could not see the meeting point between ground and sky or even a hand outstretched. Shadow and contour vanished. They were forced to send scouts ahead without the sleds, to find a path; any step might have run against a wall or plunged them into an unseen gully. They marched on, back and forth across
the same ground to gather the whole party in increments, disorientated and frustratingly slower by the day, carrying the weight of the water frozen into their clothing so that they dragged the landscape with them at every step. Tiny fine crystals clung to their clothes, their eyebrows, rimed their nostrils. From the front, they were frosted white, driving into it; their backs remained duncoloured, so that they might have been pop-up cut-outs from an ice plain made of cardboard. Every hour the flakes grew fatter.

Flurries and blinking conspired to blur their vision impossibly; their heads were so swaddled they could barely hear; so when Dr Wilkinson, bringing up the rear, plunged his foot deep into a hidden crack filled with slush, they were thirty yards on by the time they heard him calling. A faint and lonely human sound in the blizzard. They ran back, at the sinking helpless pace of a dream, hauled him out; he was quite all right, he said, just couldn’t get a purchase to pull himself up; his trouser froze solid so quickly that his leg wasn’t even touched by the cold. But Edward at last had to take the sign; it was too risky to press on. They made camp, picking at frozen knots with numb hands, wrestling with the sleds and the tent for two hours against the wind, then crawled inside and prepared to wait it out.

They spent two nights in a strange, muffled proximity, the snow insulating the tent so that sunlight and sound were dampened. Every couple of hours they would check, in turn, the weather, and report back to their companions of the void. Groundless, depthless, airless, white. They could not take a bearing without sun or stars, compounding their frustration; they might be anywhere, or nowhere in the world. The dogs, in a makeshift shelter outside, curled about one another and slept all day and night; and the men, too, felt a curious instinct towards hibernation, their blood and breathing slow in the dim-filtered light.

On the second day, Edward startled himself and the others awake with a shout. The silence pressed in again immediately, so that the sound replayed itself over in their minds, absorbed into the half-memory of the clouded sleep that had been broken by this violent rousing. He had dreamed, he wrote, ‘some horrid, frenzied madman’s act, which I cannot set down here for fear of being condemned as such. We must start again soon. We are losing time. The snow will swallow us.’ A troubled sleeper since childhood, he was haunted now by the blood-spattered silk of his nightmare all through the cloistered day. When darkness fell he lay with wide eyes beside Freely, waiting for the dawn, which brought him an hour’s fitful respite.

And when he woke to this third day he saw that they were spared. A new light pushed its way through the walls of the tent. Edward opened his eyes to the bright silk and thought, perversely, of the town fair’s marquee, as if he might step out onto well-kept parkland, a neat green lawn peopled by longskirted ladies twirling their parasols, aghast at his bearded and oil-black visage. He laughed at the vision and woke the men again, who worried for a moment that this might be some further sign of a loosening mind before seeing for themselves the sun’s return, Edward already unlacing the flap. The tent was half covered by snowdrift, become part of the brilliant new landscape that had fallen all about them and gleamed now like a white Eden in the world’s first light, under a blessed blue sky.

 

Julia looks out through the skylight at a blue so deep and clear that clouds seem impossible, the height of the summer day soaring above her, and feels her mind expanding into it, her body filled with his joy.

Just as it is almost impossible, on a day such as this one, to imagine the need of a woollen sweater or a blazing fire, so after many months in the north and the weeks of walking in the cutting wind, Edward could not now imagine heat. The thought of himself sipping an iced drink in his brother’s garden, in a light lounge suit, seemed an exotic fantasy which could not belong to his own experience. The thought of skin exposed to air was an absurdity. He couldn’t quite imagine his hands without gloves on. He was beginning to find it harder to imagine holding Emily’s in his own, her long fingers laced in his.

Hugh Compton-Hill complained of a frozen chin; it was too numb to speak properly, he said. Nordahl suggested he might keep silent, then, and concentrate his energy on growing hair to cover it. His own beard, which had been enviable at the outset, was now a thick, dark red thatch which he plaited in two to amuse them, a true Viking. Emily would not at first have known Edward; his always neatly sculpted sideburns and moustache had run amok, extending into a beard that followed the point of his chin like an unkempt Mephisto; ‘You would think me quite piratical, and call me your buccaneer,’ he tells her. Sixty years later, when she heard this, it would raise a wet chuckle as she pictured him: he looked more than ever like the poet he was not.

The snow, blown by low cross-winds, was scalloped and smoothed and ruffled like icing in striations of shadowed blue.
Sastrugi
: the Russian taught him the word. Shaped with a knife. It was how he imagined a desert to look,
it was like a massive desert rose; he had seen them in the British Museum. He had never been to a hot country (and could not now imagine heat). It is beautiful, he thought, as they stood in despair looking out at the sculpted surface. Like an ocean in arrest. Crests and flats, the light trapped in hollows, elsewhere deep blue shadows pooling, or a roseate rainbow in a translucent arc of ice; in places the snow curved over itself, a wave in the moment before breaking, creating a cave that he longed to curl into. Such a landscape is beautiful indeed, and treacherous and almost impossible to cross. They laboured over the uneven surface for hours, plunging feet into drifts that seemed solid, dragging the sleds over toughened ridges that they couldn’t slice through, upending into hollows and hauling back out. When it was possible to use the sleds as a bridge over a narrow crevasse, the dogs had to be driven across one by one, in sullen succession; one afternoon the whole pack halted without reason and refused to go on. Under the whip, they would shamble forward a few steps before sitting again, stubborn; it took an hour to cajole them into moving of their own accord. Boris, dour and dragging a hind leg at the back, was singled out for the dogs’ dinner that evening. The pack was diminishing; they grew leaner and the hunger whined in their eyes. It had always been part of Edward’s plan to pare off their number as the sled-loads grew lighter, and their only sustenance now was their own companions. When one weakened and fell and could not be stirred, it was almost a relief to poor Andreev to be spared the choosing of another for slaughter. He had taken it upon himself to slit their throats, although Edward would not ask him to serve the still-furred meat to the others.

They had been marching for weeks now, sometimes against the drift and current, so that a day’s labour barely brought them inches towards their goal; but they were drawing slowly, slowly closer. Time was collapsing; Edward
remained hopeful and recorded daily their bearing, every twenty-four hours carefully tracked in the absence of nightfall; they were closing upon the target set by Nansen, which he was determined to far surpass. It would not be enough to merely draw a little closer — there could be no triumph in a more successful failure. April slipped away; he had hoped to have come further by the month’s end, knowing the ice would be at its worst in May. They had brought provisions ample for a hundred days; he began to limit their rations, knowing they would already struggle to make it to safety with what they had, nevertheless not doubting that they would. No one mentioned turning back — or at least, if they mentioned it to Edward he did not record it, to spare them the shame. They would push on, determined even as the plain began to fracture, leads opening all around them.