The Novels of Beryl Bainbridge Volume 1

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Scott sent Bowers and Wilson back for the sledge. He seemed terribly affected by Evans’s condition and, kneeling, cradled him in his arms.

  ‘You have to understand, Titus,’ he told me, ‘that a man is often a reflection of another.’

  I couldn’t make head nor tail of that, and kept silent.

  ‘I know you all puzzle over my regard for Evans,’ he said, ‘but there’s nothing very strange in it.’

  ‘The crevasse,’ I said. ‘You faced death together.’

  ‘No, Titus, nothing so simple.’ And here his face crumpled to such an extent I feared, he would howl. I turned away, pretending to look for the sledge.

  ‘Titus,’ he said, ‘did you love your father?’

  ‘Of course,’ I replied.

  ‘And I loved mine,’ he said. Then he let go of Taff and got to his feet. ‘Stay with him,’ he ordered. ‘I’m going to help the others.’

  I tried to make Taff more comfortable, not that it was possible. I buttoned up his coat and thought of trying to put his gloves back on, but the sight of that awful hand unnerved me. Suddenly he stirred and opened his eyes. ‘Lois?’ he said.

  ‘Help’s coming,’ I said. ‘The Captain’s gone for the sledge.’

  He murmured something then about cigars and being sorry, and after that he closed his eyes and didn’t speak again, not ever.

  We got him into the tent and waited for him to die, which he did around noon. Bowers and Scott buried him. Bill was practically blind, and my fingers were useless with frostbite. They had intended to build a cairn over the body, but when it came to it they were too weak so they just scuffed the snow over him.

  Bill thinks it was probably that last blow to his head that really did for him, that and the state of his hand. Scott said he’d noticed a deterioration in his character even before he fell.

  ‘He was usually such a strong man,’ he said, ‘and utterly reliant, never slack, never slipshod in his work. And he understood what one was on about. Yet the day before we got to the Pole he didn’t strap the sleeping bags securely enough onto the sledge. If you remember, one went missing and Birdie had to go and look for it.’

  It was the first time the Pole had been mentioned since we’d turned back. God knows, we’d all thought about it and what it meant in regard to our home-coming, but none of us had dared to put our thoughts into words for fear of upsetting Scott. I’d had a dream three nights running in which we approached the Pole and, instead of those paw prints in the snow and that black flag, I stumbled across a small cairn with a blue enamel plate on top with a slab of steak lying across it.

  ‘It’s a dreadful thing to say,’ Scott said, ‘and I know you chaps will take it in the spirit in which it’s meant, but Taff’s death has considerably enhanced our own chances of survival.’

  And that was the first time, too, that survival had been mentioned, or rather the notion that we might not get through. There again, we’d all thought about it – I can’t imagine I was the only one who realised the food depots were spaced too far apart, and that blizzards and bad surfaces hadn’t been sufficiently taken into account.

  ‘He was holding us back,’ said Scott. ‘He was simply …’ and here he broke off and we all saw the tears welling up in his eyes.

  None of us knew how to comfort him, not even stalwart old Bill. During the last few weeks I’d revised my opinion of Scott, though I still couldn’t fathom why he had been so stupid as to disregard the overwhelming opinion that dogs were the only form of Antarctic transport. I still thought he was a poor leader of men in the military sense, meaning he hadn’t given enough attention to strengths, capacity, terrain, superiority of the enemy, but I had none the less come to recognise his other, more important qualities, not least his ability to put himself in another’s shoes. One could see in his eyes, even when he wasn’t blubbing, that his heart was too big for his boots. God knows how, but he’s managed to surmount his naval training and retain his essential humanity.

  I haven’t. Well, it’s all there, buried within myself, and I kid myself that faced with some terrible dilemma I’ll be able to drag it to the surface, that I’ll act out of an inborn sense of what is right, but I fear it’s not true. I’m too rigid, too encased in rules and codes of behaviour.

  I’m not explaining myself very well, but I had suddenly come to comprehend why Bill loved him. Scott is the man Bill would have liked to have been. Scott can’t draw to save his life, but he sees things.

  ‘You must have wondered,’ Scott said, ‘why I cared for Evans.’

  ‘That crevasse,’ Bill said.

  ‘Exactly what Titus put it down to,’ said Scott. He remained silent for some minutes, now and then dashing the moisture from his eyes. Then he launched into a rambling account of his childhood, his love for his mother, his fear of his father. ‘My father was a drunk,’ he said. ‘It was what one would call an occupational disease, seeing he was the manager of a brewery. I daresay he had other problems to contend with … the fact that his brothers and sisters were brighter than him, that my mother was a strenuous character. She loved him, yet despised his weaknesses. All through my childhood he alternated between the good father and the bad one. Sometimes he hit us.’

  ‘Con,’ said Bill, ‘please, there’s no need.’

  ‘Once,’ Scott said, ‘on my mother’s birthday he rose up from the dinner-table and hurled the gravy-boat into her lap. Archie and I were on the landing, peering through the banisters. We couldn’t see what went on, but we heard that thud and the murmur of disgust that followed. Then my mother came out into the hall, her dress stained with meat juice, her face blank. She looked up and saw me and Archie on the stairs, and waved. I think she wanted to say something, but words failed her.

  ‘Con,’ said Bill, ‘please stop.’

  ‘What I could never forgive,’ continued Scott, ‘was the way he cried afterwards … the way he grovelled in self-pity … the way he pleaded for understanding. Taff was an altogether different kettle of fish. He drank because he enjoyed it, not because he wanted to obliterate the moment … he never once tried to excuse his alcoholic outbursts. He was a strenuous drunk, and for that I admired him.’

  It was later that night that I asked Bill if a man without feet could ride to hounds, and Scott ordered him to give me the brandy.

  Birdie says we’ve walked, there and back, over 1500 miles, or will have done once we reach Cape Evans. We’re now two marches from One Ton Camp, wherever that is, where Cherry and the dogs will be waiting for us.

  I no longer care about distances or arrivals. I’ve passed the point when I can visualise anyone waiting in the drive, not unless they’re carrying a bedstead. All I long for is sleep. Yesterday Birdie got it in the neck for saying we’d gone too far east. As navigator he’s supposed to know where we’re going. It must be a dreadful bind to be responsible for direction. If it was left to me I’d stagger into the moon. The only woman I’ve ever loved is my mother. This is in response to Bill blethering on last night about his Oriana, who is apparently in accord with his soul. We have only his word for it.

  I think it’s my birthday tomorrow. Last night I showed Bill my left foot. He blenched. Scott saw it too.

  ‘It’s all up for me, isn’t it? I asked. ‘How will it finish? I shouldn’t want to end screaming.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Bill, ‘you’ll pull through.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Scott shouted, ‘tell him the truth.’

  Poor old Bill pulled a face. One could tell he wanted death to come like a thief in the night.

  ‘I want the morphia,’ I said. I knew we had thirty tablets apiece.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s against my principles.’

  ‘I order you to hand them over, Bill,’ Scott said. ‘I order you to give every man the means to choose his own time to die.’

  There was such a struggle over it that I lost heart. I lay in my bag, hands, feet, nose, hip, rotting to hell. Dozing, I plodded towards the Pole again, towards that blue dish a
top the cairn. This time I saw dog prints in the snow.

  Bill gave me the morphia, five tablets washed down with tea.

  ‘Pray God I won’t wake in the morning,’ I said, and sleepily shook hands with Birdie.

  What dreams I had! I think the approach of death is possibly heralded by a firework display of days gone by. My mother came to me, bossy, competent, convinced she could nurse my dead feet into life. ‘No, Mother,’ I said, ‘they’ve gone beyond recall.’

  And then she embraced me, and I thought it was her tears that rolled down my cheeks until the pain in my legs jerked me into consciousness, and I realised it was my own eyes that spilled with grief.

  I could hear Birdie snoring. There was a little chink of daylight poking through the canvas above Bill’s head. In that moment before I struggled upright it came to me that my greatest sin had been that of idleness. I had wasted my days.

  Birdie woke when I struggled out of my bag. I put my finger to my lips, enjoining silence. I wanted to kiss him good-bye, but I was too shy.

  ‘I’m just going outside,’ I said, ‘and may be some time.’

  There was a blizzard blowing. I was in my stocking-feet, yet I didn’t feel the cold. I had only struggled a few yards, the snow driving against me, when I heard voices. I waved my hand in front of me, as though I was wiping a mirror, and then I saw Boy Charger, skittering backwards and forwards in the drift.

  ‘Be so good as to restrain him, Mr Brown,’ a voice said.

  ‘I’m holding back the dawn,’ said Mr Brown. ‘Captain Oates approaches.’

  I only had to crawl a few yards; the pelting snow rained down like music.

  ‘Happy Birthday,’ sang the man holding the bridle. And oh, how warm it was.

  Master Georgie

  A Novel

  For Mike and Parvin Laurence

  Plate 1. 1846

  GIRL IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH

  I was twelve years old the first time Master Georgie ordered me to stand stock still and not blink. My head was on a level with the pillow and he had me rest my hand on Mr Hardy’s shoulder; a finger-tip chill struck through the cloth of his white cotton shirt. It was a Saturday, the feast of the Assumption, and to stop my eyelids from fluttering I pretended God would strike me blind if I let them, which is why I ended up looking so startled. Mr Hardy didn’t have to be told to keep still because he was dead.

  I say I was twelve years old, but I can’t be sure. I don’t recollect a mother and never had a birthday until the Hardy family took me in. According to Master Georgie, I’d been found some nine years before, in a cellar in Seel Street, sat beside the body of a woman whose throat had been nibbled by rats.

  I didn’t have a name, so they called me Myrtle, after the street where the orphanage stands. It was intended I should be placed there, and I would have been if the smallpox hadn’t broken out. Instead, a business gentleman on the board of the Liverpool Health Committee and known to Mr Hardy pressed him to house me until the epidemic was over. When this happened and it came time for my departure, Miss Beatrice set up howling; she’d taken a fancy to me. She lost interest the following year when Mr Hardy brought home the dog, but by then Mrs O’Gorman had taken me in hand, so they let me be.

  I was fortunate, for I was taught to read by Mrs Hardy, and Mr Hardy sometimes chucked me under the chin and asked how I did. Often, I was allowed to play with Master Freddie, before he went away to school. It was only Mrs O’Gorman who ever beat me, and that for my own good. I was not loved and counted it a blessing; it meant my affections raged undiluted and I could lavish all on Master Georgie.

  I don’t remember anything about being found. Master Georgie once told me that if I concentrated hard enough the memories might come back, like the images that reared up on his photogenic plates. That scared me, for he performed such magic in the dark, and sometimes, after he’d put the idea into my head, waking at night to the shuffle of leaves along the guttering, I fancied there was a ghastly picture about to imprint itself upon the windowpane. Noticing the shadows under my eyes and ferreting out the cause, Mrs O’Gorman declared he was a wicked boy for spooning me such nonsense.

  Twice I went back to that house in Seel Street and stood at the railings. The basement area was flooded and the window glass too grimy to peer through.

  That particular afternoon in damp August – the one that ended so curiously – began with Mrs Hardy plummeting into one of her states. I’d been summoned to see to the tiger-skin rug. The dog had got in again and Mrs O’Gorman had shooed me upstairs to stiff-brush its grey hairs from those blazing stripes. Master Georgie and Mrs Hardy were seated at opposite ends of the dining-room table.

  I didn’t like the tiger; its jaws gaped open and unlike Mr Hardy it didn’t have any lids to its eyes, which meant they glared. Mrs Hardy detested the rug as much as I did, though for different reasons. Mr Hardy swore he’d bagged the beast himself, in the Madras Province, in the days when he’d been employed as an overseer of Irrigation Works. It was a boast Mrs Hardy had shaken to fragments on more than one agitated occasion; she spat he’d bought it cheap at Riley’s auction rooms in Water Street and carried it home over his shoulder.

  The rug was positioned in front of the french windows overlooking the garden and the orchard beyond, so I had my back to the table when Mrs Hardy said, ‘Georgie, dear, you won’t be going to the Institute today, will you?’

  He agreed he wouldn’t.

  ‘Though I expect you’ll be going out on business.’

  Young as I was I sensed this was more in the nature of an accusation than a supposition. The brush turned to stone in my hand. Mrs Hardy frightened me, for she stared so. Often, when her mouth smiled it didn’t signify she was pleased. All the same, she had rescued me, taught me my letters, and I didn’t want her upset. I fixed my gaze on the plum trees in the orchard. Miss Beatrice was out there, pirouetting under branches laden with round, rotten fruit. Fat Dr Potter stalked her, face raised to the cloudy heavens.

  I heard Georgie say, ‘Not business, Mother. I’m meeting William Rimmer.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ she replied. ‘You men always have friends to see … either that or business to see to.’

  There was a silence for a long minute, broken by tapping. I swivelled on my haunches, making believe I was attending to the bony head of the tiger. Mrs Hardy was stabbing at the food on her plate and giving one of her stares, eyes lachrymose with bulging misery; gravy splattered the cloth. Master Georgie had explained to me that the stare was peculiar to a malfunction of the thyroid, a gland common to us all, only in Mrs Hardy’s case it had started growing. As for her misery, why, that was all due to her husband; she was a neglected wife. Mr Hardy had promised to come home at midday and already it was five after three by the clock on the mantelshelf.

  Master Georgie rose then and stooped to kiss his mother on the cheek. She jerked her head away and he made a small mew of annoyance.

  ‘For pity’s sake,’ she whined, ‘help me, for I can’t help myself.’

  ‘I don’t know how to, Mother,’ he said, and the defeated slump of his shoulders pierced me to the quick.

  Usually he offered to stay with her when she was out of sorts, and almost always she told him not to be foolish. This time he didn’t utter a word. He just stood there, looking down at her tear-stained face. She was harder on him than on either Master Freddie or Miss Beatrice. It was because he was her first born and she’d been torn to pieces before he plopped out. Mrs O’Gorman told me that. I didn’t doubt he loved her still, but those childhood days when he could show clinging proof of it had gone for ever.

  She said bitterly, ‘Don’t look so worried, Georgie. You mustn’t let my little misfortunes spoil your day,’ to which he retorted with equal bitterness, ‘To hear is to obey.’ I ran out of the room because I couldn’t bear it any longer.

  The hall kept changing from dark to light as clouds ran over the sun. When I dragged the plug of dog hairs from the brush a current of air from the le
aded window whirled it, dandelion fashion, up the well of the stairs to circle the antlers of the stag’s head on the landing.

  The evening before, Mrs O’Gorman had trapped me in the scullery to acquaint me with the Assumption. She said someone had to school me, seeing I was being raised in such a Godless house. That was a dig at Dr Potter, for being under the sway of the new sciences. Dr Potter held that the world wasn’t created in six days; it was more like thousands of years. Why, even mountains hadn’t always stayed in the same place. St James’ Mount, which overlooks the sunken cemetery, may once have been a flat stretch of earth, grassless under a sheet of ice.

  It didn’t worry me like it did Mrs O’Gorman, who moaned that it wasn’t for the likes of her to doubt the permanency of rocks. But then, her rock was the Kingdom of Heaven and she didn’t want it shifted.

  She’d pinned me to the chair at the scullery table and trumpeted that tomorrow was a special day, one on which the body of Our Lord’s mother had been wafted up to heaven to be united with her soul. The worms hadn’t got to her like they will with me, on account of Our Lord loving her so. I only half believed her.

  Above me, the web of hair began to drift apart. I mouthed He loves me, he loves me not, though I wasn’t thinking of Our Lord.

  Presently Master Georgie emerged and began to button himself into his outdoor coat. His fur-lined cloak, the one I tugged out later, hung abandoned in the hall closet. He’d left off wearing it because Mr Hardy, returning merry with drink from mornings at the Corn Exchange, had cried out once too often, ‘O Vanitas vanitatem.’

  A noise of busted china came from the dining room. Master Georgie flinched; Mrs Hardy’s heart was in pieces for the umpteenth time and she was taking it out on the dinner plates. A sunbeam pierced the fanlight above the front door, painting his hair with silver.

  Just then, Mrs O’Gorman came up the basement stairs and said calmly enough, ‘You be on your way, Master Georgie. No sense both of us being put upon.’

  He dithered for a moment, during which time Mrs Hardy, wailing like a banshee, rushed from the dining room and clambered clumsily up the stairs. Mrs O’Gorman stood her ground, her face giving nothing away. The sun went in again and Master Georgie faded. Looking across the hall he crooked his finger for me to follow.