Under a Pole Star: Richard & Judy Book Club 2017 - the most unforgettable love story of the year

by Stef Penney

  .

  By the time he is finished – and Curly has done her unspeakable business – the sun has emerged from a bank of cloud, and he is rather appalled to see Mrs Athlone standing outside the British tents as he walks back, although she cannot possibly have seen . . .

  He finds her hard to fathom: there were times on the beach last night when she seemed to lose her guardedness; at others, moments later, she was again withdrawn and serious. He saw her face transform as she gazed, laughing, at the storm cloud of birds – he wanted to snatch another picture, but didn’t dare.

  ‘Good morning! Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Good morning, Mr de Beyn. Well, but little. After you and Dr Urbino retired, I was half the night with Apilah’s family. They will sleep till after lunch.’ She smothers a yawn.

  ‘It’s been a long time since you saw them?’

  ‘Four years.’

  She smiles at something behind him, and Jakob is horrified to see Curly trot towards them wagging her tail, as if hoping for more tasty morsels.

  ‘I’m sure I recognise that dog . . . A bitch, isn’t it?’

  ‘I . . . I’m not sure. Do you have to leave immediately, because . . .’ He loses his thread as Curly goes straight to Mrs Athlone and rubs her head on her trousers, tongue lolling out of her mouth. He watches in horror as Mrs Athlone stretches her hand to the dog and Jakob is appalled to find himself aiming his boot at Curly’s ribs.

  ‘Get away!’ he shouts over the dog’s pained yelp. Mrs Athlone recoils, astonished and repelled. Jakob realises that he has, to all appearances, launched an unprovoked attack on an innocent, friendly animal. Curly looks at him with reproach, Mrs Athlone with icy disdain.

  ‘Excuse me. I’m very sorry, but’ – he can’t think of a single excuse that doesn’t point to the truth – ‘but that’s a very reprehensible animal, and you don’t want to . . . to go anywhere near her,’ he finishes, lamely.

  Mrs Athlone draws herself upright, any warmth in her eyes quite gone.

  ‘You’re right. I should know better.’

  ‘She’s a notorious biter,’ he says warmly, feeling the sweat springing out of his pores. ‘She nearly took Erdinger’s hand off, and it got infected. You know, what with – with what they eat.’ He laughs abruptly, not wanting to pursue it further.

  ‘Well, I’d better . . .’

  She turns away. Clearly her opinion of him is very low, and this distresses him more than he can account for. The sweat under his arms now chills him.

  ‘Please don’t think I normally go around kicking animals. Not without very good reason.’

  Mrs Athlone looks at him with one eyebrow slightly raised.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  Sure that she is laughing at him now, Jakob feels his face hot.

  ‘Well . . .’ He starts to back away. ‘I meant to say, last night: the photographs . . . I’ll try to develop them before we leave, but if I can’t, I’ll send you prints – if you give me an address.’

  ‘It’s not necessary.’ She seems to find this unacceptably forward.

  ‘I thought you seemed uncomfortable, last night, and I don’t want you to feel that I was . . .’ Unsure how this sentence is going to finish, he abandons it and tries another. ‘Some people think a photograph steals their soul, and I understand. But if you have the results yourself, then you . . . you have it back, don’t you?’ He laughs again, unsure why he is talking such rubbish.

  ‘If I thought that, it would make my role as leader of an expedition difficult in this day and age.’

  ‘I don’t talk of a rational feeling, but a photograph does carry an essence of its subject. It brings someone closer. That’s why I keep my mother’s portrait, to keep her in some way alive to me. I’m sure you know what I mean . . .’

  Jakob wonders how on earth he got on to this topic, which seems enormously inappropriate. He has begun to apologise when she smiles, quite kindly.

  ‘I think I understand, Mr de Beyn. Anyway . . .’

  She turns back to her tent.

  ‘Yes. You have much to do. Stay away from that dog.’ He aims this at her retreating back.

  She turns round. ‘I’ll try to.’

  She smiles then, a proper smile, at him. It is like glimpsing another person who lives inside her skin. There is something both reckless and intimate in her smile that makes the raw morning seem warm.

  .

  Lester has woken in a good mood, and invites the British for breakfast. They eat porridge and scrambled auks’ eggs and drink the last of the coffee, and it is possible to tell from the atmosphere that Lester has decided the British expedition, under their unlikely leader, poses no serious competition.

  Jakob does not get the chance to speak to Mrs Athlone again, but, in the course of swallowing a mouthful of coffee, he becomes conscious that something has changed. It is a sudden and precise conviction (before the mouthful, it didn’t exist; after, it irrefutably is), and it is this: that Mrs Athlone is thinking about him. The certainty of it shocks him. He glances towards her. Was something said? Is everyone looking at him, aware of this momentous change? Her eyes are on Frank as he speaks, or on Lester; she speaks little; she says nothing at all to him.

  Jakob and Seddon continue to discuss the difficulties of glare, the preponderance of blue light; he listens to Seddon’s views on ice photography and responds as though everything is normal, but all the time he knows that she is intimately aware of everything he says and does, that she is surrounding him with her heartfelt attention, and . . .

  In answer to her question, Armitage says, ‘It depends on the ice, when we leave. We are hopeful of seeing the ship before long. Then you will have a clear field.’

  There will be no ‘and’. He will leave shortly, and never see her again. He looks at the crumbs on his plate. They hardly know each other. Still, the conviction remains: a heady certainty. When the parties make their farewells on the beach, it is as real as the rocks and the wind. Standing with the others, Jakob shakes Mrs Athlone by the hand and wishes her a safe and successful stay, and she thanks him, holding his gaze for a moment – not long enough for anyone else to guess what has happened, but long enough.

  .

  It has not happened to him before. He imagines it to be what grace feels like: something undeserved, bestowed. A precious nugget he chooses to keep, in the face of all likelihood and common sense.

  Chapter 20

  Unnamed cape, 76˚14’N, 69˚51’W

  August 1892

  The sea is white; the sky, the same grey as the land. A freezing wind hurts their eyes, sticks sharp fingers under hoods, through gaps in clothes. It picks up snow crystals and flings them in their faces, and sprays them over the hillside where Pualana and Ayakou toil with shovels. On the slope that faces the sea, they have dug a pit eight feet in diameter and a yard deep, and have uncovered what Lester was so determined to find. The snow puts up a fight: it tries to harry them into submission, tries to fill the hole they have made, to cover what it contains, but the thing is visible under a carapace of ice.

  Armitage and Shull saw it a month earlier. Armitage set off, ostensibly to secure the promise of dogs for ‘next time’. But that was not all they did. Last winter, Johannes had told them about the meteorite that had for a long time been the Eskimos’ only source of iron. He called it the sky stone. Lester persuaded some locals to show him its location, and on finding that it lay near the coast – perched on a hillside above a rocky inlet – he formed a plan to prise it from its resting place and take it home.

  .

  They have little time. It is August and the water is shrinking in the sound. The Sachem is moored at the end of the fjord, its captain on the verge of abandoning them. Somehow – no one is sure how – they are to dig this huge rock out of its bed, lever and roll it down the slope, and convey it to a point on the shore where th
e ship can approach. Then lift it on to the ship. Erdinger has calculated that it weighs at least six tons, but, like an iceberg or a molar, it could extend far beyond sight.

  Armitage has commandeered the Sachem’s spare mast timber for rollers, and brace beams to use as levers, themselves almost too heavy to lift. Frank and Erdinger have evolved a plan; like any mechanical problem, there is a solution. Erdinger says the seven of them should be able to do it. Taking turns, they chop out the frozen ground around the stone, enough to insert the beams, and then all throw their weight on the uphill levers, until it starts, minutely, to shift.

  Jakob, the smallest and lightest member of the expedition, steps back to hammer the shorter beams into the new space, and thus, little by little, the giant is cajoled up out of the hillside. It takes hours and all their strength, but at last they flip the stone on to its back, like a giant beetle. The underside is rounded, implying that, when it fell to earth, snow cushioned its fall. That same snow inched it towards the coast, until there was no ice left to convey it further, and it settled here. On the upper side are marks where the Eskimos hammered and chipped off flakes of iron; mounds of trap stones testify to the years of use. Strangely, to Jakob’s mind, neither Pualana nor Ayakou seem unhappy at the thought of the iron stone being taken away from them. Ayakou says no one has used it for years. After a century of whalers have come and gone, trading iron tools for ivory, every hunter has nails and a file, every woman has needles and a scraping knife with a blade that hails from Dundee or Hull. Lester is rewarding the two men with a gun each.

  .

  Lester releases Jakob so that he can sketch the hillside and take samples. He works at frantic speed: a find of such importance; he imagines the papers he will write about it; after all, no one in a better position than he. It could bring him modest fame, perhaps a book . . . He scrambles around taking photographs, measuring dip and incline and plotting the site as accurately as he can. He turns his back to the wind to take another photograph, waiting for a lull in the blowing snow. He tastes the ambition in his mouth, and grins.

  The shrieks make him turn round. The camera is instinctively held to his eye, but for long moments he does not understand what he sees: forty yards down the slope, the meteorite has sheered away from its path; a body lies beside it, distinct from it, the others swarming around, but not enough . . . not enough of them. A wail pierces the white air. Jakob plunges down the hillside towards them.

  .

  There was nothing they could have done. A beam cracked under the enormous weight, the meteorite rolled – just as it was planned that it would roll, but more to one side than they planned – and one of the men was a shade slow jumping out of its path. It caught a foot, he fell – downhill – and somehow, slowly, cruelly, the stone sucked him under its alien gravity. It came to rest on his trapped body.

  .

  Frank lies face down in the snow, his head pointing towards the sea and home. He is invisible from the chest down, the lower half of his body crushed under six tons of metal that has no business here. He is alive, conscious, calm with shock, completely aware that this is the end.

  Jakob is on his knees by his head, screaming at the others to get the beams in place to lift it off him, and they struggle to do so, frantically shouting, straining, working. Ayakou has also been injured; Pualana kneels by his son. Lester yells at him to help them. He does so. The men roar at the stone in their rage. Jakob jumps up to join in. Shull and Erdinger and Lester are hammering beams in either side of Frank to lever it up.

  ‘Go to him,’ Erdinger says shortly.

  Frank, belching blood, gasps at Jakob, who kneels and takes his hands – spreadeagled on the ground – in his. He struggles for breath, but can only speak in a funny, crushed voice.

  ‘Jake . . . have to hear my confession.’

  ‘I can’t . . .’ Appalled, Jakob watches the blood ooze between his teeth.

  ‘You can. Allowed . . . Say sorry . . . to Marion.’

  ‘There’s no need.’ Jakob shakes his head, denying it through freezing tears, but Frank begins to confess. Jakob has to bend until their heads are touching to hear him, but after a few sentences, he can no longer make out words. Frank has so few sins to confess. He still breathes, and Jakob mutters soothing things – hopeful, meaningless rubbish he doesn’t believe: that he is going to be all right, that they will free him, that they are going home.

  Frank’s eyes are closed now, his face relaxed, the lips no longer pulled back in that terrible snarl. The snow has drunk his blood; the red stain spreads around his head like a halo. Jakob prays that he is unconscious. He goes on talking to him, holding his hands in his.

  At some later point – he doesn’t know how much time has passed or what the others have been doing, but his feet and hands are frozen, and Shull is tugging at his shoulder, repeating his name – he realises that he is talking to no one.

  .

  The wail he heard came not from Frank, but from Ayakou, who was relatively lucky – the stone caught him but rolled over his right leg and moved on, leaving it broken and bloody. Grimly, Lester issues orders; Shull, Jakob and Pualana are to take Ayakou to the British base, several miles up the coast. Erdinger is to go to the ship for reinforcements, who will move the stone and deal with Frank’s body. Jakob hates to leave him; there is something awful – pathetic – about the stump of his friend poking out from under a stone, but he knows Lester is right. Lester is immaculate in a crisis – decisive, calm, thorough. He is terribly upset, Jakob can tell, although his face barely changes. Ayakou, after that first cry, makes no sound. Even as they half lift, half drag him down to the sled – clumsily, without Frank to tell them how best to do it – he does not moan.

  The journey around the bay is long and difficult. They try to keep the sled on a smooth course, but it is impossible. At some point, to their relief, Ayakou passes out. The weather gets worse, until the wind is screaming. They are forced to stop and wait out the blizzard under a cliff that offers little shelter.

  Forty hours until they make it to Siorapaluk in the middle of the night. The British are woken by the howl of dogs. They know before anyone speaks that something terrible has happened.

  .

  Dr Seddon and some villagers carry Ayakou into the house. Jakob’s hands are like blocks of wood, incapable of gripping anything, incapable even of removing his own mittens. Shull takes them off for him, and, when he pulls off the left one, a portion of his little finger remains in the glove. Jakob stares in dull shock. Shull swears, shakes out the piece of frozen flesh, which falls to the floor.

  ‘What is it?’ Mrs Athlone has come over. Embarrassed, Jakob bends down and tries to pick up the fragment of his body – it being his responsibility, after all – but his hands are too numb to grasp the damn thing.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t . . .’

  ‘Oh, heavens, you poor thing!’ she cries. She bends down and, incredibly, picks up his finger, and takes it to Dr Seddon.

  .

  Afterwards, he is sat at the table with a bowl of tepid water and told to soak his frozen hands. Shull alternately eats and pushes spoonfuls of food into Jakob’s mouth. At one point, a mug of brandy is lifted to his lips and he drinks, which makes him cough.

  Seddon is operating on Ayakou’s leg. The blizzard has returned, and howls around the house, thumping the walls with angry, thwarted blows. Mrs Athlone is busy, boiling water, going to and fro from the makeshift operating theatre at one end of the hut. Shull and Jakob sit at the table, mute with misery and exhaustion.

  Jakob must have slept, as he wakes to find Seddon pulling off his socks.

  ‘Shull said I should have a look at you. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about the finger.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ croaks Jakob.

  Seddon examines his feet – they are white and burning with pain. As he points out, the fact they hurt is a good sign.
/>
  ‘You’re lucky; you’ll lose some skin, but it’s not too severe. Let’s see the hands . . . Were you not wearing gloves?’

  ‘I don’t . . . I think . . . I was using the camera when it happened.’

  ‘It’s been how long? More than forty hours?’

  Jakob nods. Seddon fetches his surgical bag and, with a tool that looks like a pair of pliers, neatens up the stump and sews fresh skin over the wound. Now he has nine and a half fingers. Jakob watches dispassionately, only wishing it would hurt more; he would have given up his hand – his arm – if it meant that Frank could be here. In answer to his question, Seddon tells him that Ayakou will keep his leg and should survive, more or less whole. Seddon beckons Mrs Athlone to hold the bandage in place as he binds it up. She does so efficiently, without squeamishness.

  ‘I’m sorry to have taken off more tissue, but I don’t want to take risks with gangrene. You’ll need to be careful of it for a while. And, er, try to stay out of the cold.’

  Jakob nods, unable to raise a smile.

  At last, Seddon rolls his shoulders and slumps into a chair. Mrs Athlone pours mugs of brandy and tea, and brings one to Jakob.

  ‘Shall I hold it? You can manage?’

  He nods and takes it between bandaged palms. Her look seems to acknowledge what he felt at their last meeting, but he does not know what to do with it.

  ‘I’m so very sorry about your friend. Mr Shull told me how close you were.’

  Jakob nods. He is disgusted with himself. While Frank’s future hurtled to its end, he was enjoying thoughts of his future success. He titillated himself with the boons the damned rock would bring him, while it had gone about killing his friend.

  .

  When there is no more to be done, she makes them go to bed. Jakob rolls into a bunk with his clothes on. He thinks about Frank’s sisters, and how he will have to tell them what happened. Marion, too. They don’t know the calamity that has just befallen them. For weeks, they will go on thinking of Frank, thinking that he is alive. Frank was loved by a lot of people. Far more than love or would mourn him. He cannot avoid the conclusion that it would have been better for the sum of the world’s happiness if he had died in Frank’s place, but the world does not appear to take such calculations into account.