The Novels of Beryl Bainbridge Volume 1

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Bill told him. ‘If anyone’s to blame, I am’, and he gripped Cherry’s arm and begged him to be careful.

  On we blundered, staggering, rolling down snowslopes, the sledge catching our heels and knocking us off our feet. We were like flies fluttering against a window that would never open. And by now the twilight had faded. At last, exhausted, we floundered to a halt, all but sinking to our knees. It was then, from somewhere below us on the sea-ice, we heard the Emperors calling.

  I can’t tell you how bucked we were, especially for Bill. I was all for going on, but he said it was far too dangerous and we needed food and rest. On the way back I don’t think any of us gave much thought to the crevasses; we were past caring and it was time to put our trust in Someone else, for we had gone beyond the point when we could look after ourselves.

  I swear my mother was with me, or rather waiting somewhere ahead, not smiling or beckoning, but there all the same, the firelight flickering across her dear face, her Moody and Sanky hymn book on her lap. There was a moment, levering Cherry up from yet another crevasse, when I thought I heard her singing, and I turned my head to one side the better to catch the tune. I’m not ashamed to say tears came into my eyes, of affection not weakness, tears which froze as they fell.

  That night we camped in Oriana’s house and used up yet more oil cooking our supper. We’d gone without food two nights running to save on fuel, making do with a drink of hot water, and I think Cherry might have died if we’d done so again. Truth to tell, the tent with its double lining was warmer than the igloo, but we’d shifted the cooker and the sleeping bags and were simply too done in to lug them back again.

  Bill was fearfully alarmed at the state of our clothing. Once they were half-way thawed we’d got into the habit of wrapping them round our limbs in order to prevent them sticking out at odd angles, but it was a risky business; sometimes they froze so tightly to our bodies it was like being encased in armour, with the result we could hardly drag one leg after the other. My green hat, which I’d adapted for the journey by adding ear flaps and neck guards and whatnot, was a never-failing source of amusement. If I’d fallen asleep with it still in place I woke to find its appendages hanging about my cheeks, and when I went outside and pushed them out of the way they froze into the most astonishing shapes. Often I marched with what appeared to be a jerry balanced on my head, handles and all, and another time, ducking my way out of the tent after one of the blizzards, a shower of drift settled on the top and instantly sculptured itself into a rough approximation of an alighting bird, though God knows, an ornithologist would have been hard put to name the species. Spying it, Cherry sang out: ‘For you don’t know Nellie like I do/Said the naughty little bird on Nellie’s hat’, which was the chorus of one of Meares’s favourite gramophone records back at Cape Evans.

  We got up early again, and it was no great hardship. I can’t pretend we were rested, yet we were cheerful enough, the experiences of the day before having convinced us that the pressure ridges ran further out into the bay than in Discovery times, and that Bill’s old route had gone. We’d made up our minds there was only one way down – over the cliffs. A 200-foot descent in darkness was unthinkable, but I’d spotted a break in the rocks from which hung an ice-floe. It was just possible we could get down to the rookery on this.

  We reached the cliffs seven hours later and descended a fair distance, cutting steps where our crampons couldn’t find a foothold, scrambling over and under those gigantic growths squeezed up by the moving ice, only to meet a glacial wall which even a madman would have recognised as impassable. Like spiders we crawled sideways, and suddenly Bill shouted out triumphantly, ‘Birdie, over here!’, and there in front of us was a black tunnel burrowed into the ice, just wide enough for a man to enter.

  ‘Here goes,’ Bill said, and we followed him, wriggling and slithering through that fox’s hole until we emerged on a crystallised ledge above the bay. Below us, uttering metallic cries of alarm and looking like so many overworked waiters, strutted the Emperor penguins.

  There was a snorter of a drop onto the sea-ice, not so difficult to make if one was planning on staying below, but ticklish if one was contemplating coming up again. Cherry volunteered to stay behind to haul us aloft; being blind as a bat, this was no more than sensible.

  Bill and I slaughtered three of the Emperors for their blubber – each bird weighed in excess of six stone – and took five of their eggs. Bill was concerned at the decline in their numbers. The Discovery expedition had found over 2000 birds breeding in the bay, and now there were less than a hundred, and half of those were without eggs. I thought them peculiarly and disturbingly human, in that when we lunged forward to plunge a knife into their breasts, and missed, they waddled further off and then stopped to look back, standing there in an attitude of saintly reproachfulness. I couldn’t decide whether they were stupid or possessed of superior intelligence, and prayed it was the former.

  Getting back up the cliff was a nightmare. The rope got snagged and we dangled round and round, fighting for a foothold on that slippery incline. Not once throughout our dreadful journey had a cross word come between us, nor had we forgotten the civilities, those please-and-thank-yous which can mean so much when everything else has gone by the board. When it came to it, none of us had dodged the column and each had put the other’s welfare above his own. I believe Bill and Cherry to be giants among men, incapable of self-interest, and time and again I saw them snap their fingers in the face of the Prince of Darkness – and now, when the rope was slack and Cherry’s pickaxe came hurtling past us, Bill broke and shouted out, ‘Cherry, for God’s sake, man, pull.’

  As it happened, I don’t think Cherry took it amiss. He was half delirious with exhaustion, his frost-bitten fingers bulging like plums. When Bill reached the top and apologised for his outburst, gripping Cherry’s gloves in his own, Cherry all but fainted at the pressure. ‘My fault,’ he gasped, as though he was a papist. ‘My most grievous fault.’

  We took the five eggs back in our mitts. Both of Cherry’s smashed on the way, for he fell so often. Earlier, the wind had got up, and now it grew worse, covering our tracks. Before long it was blowing force four and we floundered about, first in one direction, then another, sometimes doubling backwards in an effort to find the igloo. Cirrus cloud whirled across the north stars and there was a haze of fog to the south.

  I’ve read stories in which weary travellers, lost in the mists on some rugged moor, come at last to a comfortable inn at the wayside, the landlord waiting with hot grog, the fire roaring in the hearth, clean sheets spread across goose feather mattresses. Our particular inn, when we did finally stumble across it, let in the wind and the snowdrift, yet we thought it the most hospitable place on earth.

  It took two hours to get the blubber stove lit; just as it began to burn more strongly a blob of boiling fat spat into Bill’s eye. He reckoned his sight had gone and thrust his arm against his mouth to stifle his groans. It was well-nigh unbearable not being able to do anything for him beyond uttering platitudes and watching him suffer.

  Cherry was a tower of strength. Going outside, he plugged up as many of the gaps in the walls as he could find. His fingers were now easier, he said, and he put it down to the oil in the broken eggs in his mitts.

  When we’d eaten and were a little warmer we discussed our situation. I was all for making another descent to the rookery, yet I knew it was out of the question – Cherry and Bill were almost at the end of their tether, we had one tin of oil left for the return journey, and our clothing was in rags. Bill said we ought to rest up, wait for calmer weather and then make a run for home. ‘We’ve reached rock-bottom,’ he said faintly, pressing a wad of cotton rag dunked in cold tea to his injured eye. ‘Things must improve.’

  That night I dreamt I was on that other ghastly run, the St Paul’s Journeys, an initiation torture devised for new cadets on the Worcester. The victim had to sprint the length of the lower deck and back, and the
n to his hammock under the top hammocks of the older chaps who hit him with boots, rope, knotted towels, anything that hurt. I could hear my heart thumping in my chest as I ran and the shouts of those bully-boys above me. All my youthful enthusiasm and ideals had melted away, replaced by cunning and an animal necessity to go to ground. Then it became very quiet – the other fellows vanished, and there was nobody but me standing there, eyes wide with terror. A sob burst from me – or so I thought. I woke instantly, to a terrible suffocating silence. The next moment I heard a second, greater sob, a fearsome gulp of sound fit to swallow the universe.

  Scrambling out of my bag I opened the igloo door, at which the world suddenly cracked wide open, the wind shrieking about my ears, a solid wall of black snow crushing me to my knees. As if under water I dog-paddled those few yards to the tent, came up against the provision boxes, felt for that neat row of finneskö, that canvas sack containing a copy of Bleak House and the poems of Tennyson, the tin of sweets I’d brought to celebrate Bill’s birthday. I crawled back, calling for Cherry, and twice I was flung on my face by the force of the wind. ‘The tent’s gone,’ I shouted.

  Cherry and I laboured for what seemed like years transferring the gear to the igloo. All but crazy from the pain of his eye, Bill could do no more than lie in the doorway and blindly shovel the drift from the entrance.

  I don’t know what the other two were thinking while we sank into hell. I know there were two halves of me, one which raced ahead working out ways of getting back to Cape Evans by means of digging holes in the ice and using the ground sheet as a covering, and the other which longed to curl up in the igloo and acknowledge we were done for.

  It wasn’t that I’d given up hope, rather that the loss of the tent and the inhuman fury of the hurricane tearing at the canvas roof, so that it rattled as though we were under continuous rifle-fire, had the same hallucinatory effect as the auroral display of our outward journey and drove me into dreams. I relived the moment when I opened the igloo door and heard that mighty crack of the elements, and sometimes I saw a giant chick emerge from a giant egg, and sometimes I watched a cork pulled from a cobwebbed bottle labelled ‘Emergency’, its plume of escaped vapour whirling up and up until it fashioned itself into the shape of a turbaned genie whose blue eyes flashed bolts of lightning. Over and over, as though words could drown the roar of that awful wind, I murmured those lines of Tennyson:

  Oh that ’twere possible

  After long grief and pain

  To find the arms of my true love

  Round me once again.

  And I had such regrets, for I’d never known an untrue love, let alone one of the other sort, and the only arms that had ever tenderly held me were those of my mother.

  By degrees, I pulled myself together. I think at the beginning we sang to keep our spirits up: hymns, ballads, bits of Evensong. Cherry gallantly tried to warble ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’, but when it came to the line, ‘Darling I am growing older’ his voice trailed away at the realisation there was every possibility such a process was beyond his expectations. I remembered the requirements deemed necessary for the Gold Medal for cadets, and duly bawled them out: ‘A cheerful submission to superiors, self-respect and independence of character, kindness and protection to the weak, readiness to forgive offence, desire to conciliate the differences of others, and, above all, fearless devotion to duty and unflinching truthfulness.’ At this, triggered by some secret memory of his own, Cherry clutched my arm and began to laugh. Then the roof went. The topmost rocks of the walls fell in upon us, together with a blanket of drift.

  The fact that we were almost into our sleeping bags saved us, that and the ridge above us which in some measure deflected the wind howling towards the Ross Sea. Cherry dived forward to help Bill, who shouted, ‘See to yourself!’ and Cherry still persisting, ‘Please, Cherry, please.’ All the urgency and worry in the world was in his voice, for he held himself responsible for our ghastly dilemma.

  Somehow we burrowed deeper into those wretched bags, pulling them over and round until we lay on that wild mountainside cocooned in ragged shrouds, nothing between us and the hidden stars but that swirling, maddening blizzard.

  I think we dozed a good bit; the temperature had risen with the storm, and we were kept almost snug by the snow that fell upon us. Every now and then I kicked out at Cherry to see if he still lived, and all of us heaved up at intervals to jerk the drift away. We didn’t eat for two days and two nights, apart from handfuls of snow to ease our raw throats and a boiled sweet apiece in honour of Bill’s birthday.

  On the Monday there was a lull in the storm. Though it was still blowing we could talk without shouting. We asked each other how we felt … Pretty well, thank you, all things considered; if Bill’s eye was better … Oh, yes, much better, thank you; if Cherry’s hands were on the mend … Thank you, yes … The swelling is much reduced. None of us enquired how we were going to survive.

  The wind further abating, we got out of our bags and searched for the tent. I don’t think any of us really thought we’d find it, but we went through the motions. We were lucky in that all our gear was intact, save for two pieces of the cooker and a pair of Cherry’s socks which had been snatched from his finneskö. At last Bill said we must cook ourselves a meal, though it was a curious fact we had little desire for food; our bodies had taken such a beating and we were so diminished from lack of sleep that eating seemed too great an effort. We struggled through the preparations, stretching the ground sheet over us and somehow huddling beneath it, lighting the primus, holding the broken cooker in our hands, waiting an age for the snow to melt. Then, the pemmican beginning to heat and the smell rising, our appetites returned and we gobbled that meaty mess seasoned with penguin feathers, dirt, burnt blubber and reindeer hairs, and voted it the best dinner we’d ever had.

  I went out afterwards to look again for the tent, though I imagined by now it had blown half-way to New Zealand. There was a small glow of light on the horizon, but the sky to the south was heaped with black clouds and I feared another blizzard would soon be on top of us. I was clambering sideways, slithering down the slope below the ridge, when I lost my footing and rolled clear to the bottom, and there, furled like an umbrella, lay the tent.

  ‘Nothing will convince me this is all down to chance,’ I told Bill. ‘I really believe we’ve been saved for a purpose.’

  ‘We still have the journey back,’ he reminded.

  ‘We’ll make it,’ I said. ‘There’s something else God has in store for us, something glorious. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘You may be right,’ he said, staring at me gravely, his one good eye so filled with concern I turned my head away.

  That night we packed the sledges ready for an early start. Cherry’s come a long way since he boarded the Terra Nova unable to say boo to a goose, and we had quite a fierce argument over the gear. Everything we carried was so swollen with frozen moisture that the weights had trebled, and he was for leaving most of it behind. Bill wouldn’t hear of it; he said the Owner would never forgive him if we failed to return without every last item. Later, Cherry confided that when the tent blew away he made up his mind to ask Bill for the morphia and put an end to it all. ‘My dear chap,’ I said, ‘he would never have agreed.’

  ‘I believe I did ask him,’ he said, ‘but he couldn’t hear me on account of the wind and you yelling that gibberish about devotion to duty.’

  For six days the weather did its worst. Time and again we were forced to make camp as yet another blizzard raged about us. And by now our bags were in such a deplorable condition – we’d stopped bothering to roll them up and simply lashed them, coffin-shaped, onto the sledges – it hardly mattered whether we were in or out of them. As for sleeping, we got most rest on the march, falling into blissful dozes interrupted by our bumping into each other, at which we woke and comically cried out, ‘So sorry! Good morning, is everything all right?’ We wasted a lot of our conscious hours working out how many years of our life
we would give for a long, warm sleep. Cherry thought two, and subsequently changed it to five, but that was when his bag split down the middle.

  On the 28th the temperature was –47, and a crimson glow spread across the Barrier Edge. We wouldn’t see the sun for another month but already the light was lasting longer and sometimes the sky turned blue. On the 29th, which was my birthday, though I didn’t let on, we came in sight of Castle Rock. Cherry whooped with joy, and a piece of his front tooth spat into the snow. The cold had killed off the nerves in his jaw, and whenever he shouted his splintered teeth sprayed out like crumbs.

  Two days later we were within five miles of Cape Evans. Over breakfast, a mug of hot water thickened with biscuit and a blob of butter, Bill said, ‘I want to thank you for what you’ve done. I couldn’t have found two better companions, and what is more, I never shall.’

  Neither Cherry nor I could reply; our hearts were too full for words.

  It may be that the purpose of the worst journey in the world had been to collect eggs which might prove a scientific theory, but we’d unravelled a far greater mystery on the way – the missing link between God and man is brotherly love.

  Bill said we shouldn’t go into the hut, not immediately; we ought to put up the tent and sleep outside. I had thought someone might be on the lookout for us, but there was no one in sight; even the dogs ignored our approach. We could hear Handel’s Water Music on the gramophone. We stood there, trying to shift the harnesses from ourselves, moving like sleep-walkers.

  Then the door opened. ‘Good God!’ somebody called, and caught in a triangle of blinding light we froze, three men encased in ice.

  Capt. Lawrence Edward (Titus) Oates

  March 1912

  I didn’t take my sock off because the size of my foot unnerved me. When I last took a peek it was pretty colourful, blotched with red and purple, the skin right up to the ankle shining with that same sort of sweet glaze one sees on rotten meat. Two of my toes were black. I was afraid to remove my sock for fear my toes came with it and we’d all sniff their stink above the smell of that stew in the saucepan. I wish to God I’d listened to Ponting when he said we ought to bring a pistol on with us.