by Stef Penney
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Before he sinks into oblivion, he becomes once more aware of her, quietly moving around behind him and then settling with a sigh into a chair. There are creaks and sighs all around him, but even with eyes closed he seems to see her every move; he hears her breathing, feels her weight turning in the chair, and the conviction returns with greater force than before – he is bathed in the warmth of her attention, and is glad. And he knows that she is aware of his regard. There is nothing to be done about it, but the knowledge gives him comfort; it is a distant lighthouse seen from his small craft: a faint, still point of light across dark, treacherous seas.
PART FOUR: ARCTURUS IN BOÖTES
Chapter 21
Gander, Newfoundland, 48˚57’N, 54˚36’W
April 1948
Doubtless, to some of the creatures on earth, the stars in the sky are as undifferentiated as so many grains of sand. To those who use their lights to guide them, they are distinct in brightness and meaning – old friends whose testimony can be relied on. To those who have lived with them through an Arctic winter, using them as landmarks and seamarks, a constant through the long dark, the stars have not only meaning, but characters, like people. Some, like Spica, are shy and gentle, others strident: Sirius, for example, or Arcturus – an insistent, boastful fellow. Some are steadfast: Polaris and Betelgeuse; some, like Aldebaran, with its shadowy cohorts, untrustworthy. Others are dear as family: Vega, of course, and Pollux. Some tug at the heart, like loves lost.
All fancy, but in the last few years Flora has become increasingly fanciful. Her younger self would have derided such feelings, although it must have been her younger self that gave rise to them. Now, different stages of her life – her childhood; the last love affair (ah, Mr Choudhury, teller of tales) – seem equally distant, equally near.
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She knows that, to the others at the air base, like the boy with the teeth, she is merely old. How would he react if he knew (for example) that she had been a septuagenarian adulteress? If she told him of the things she had done in the Arctic? With disgust, probably. Embarrassment, and disbelief. He would find it easier if she were dead, when both her youth and her old age would be beyond reach. But as the old woman who is here now, she is expected to have erased certain sections of her past, to have become a harmless concoction of . . . what? Memories, eccentricity and knitting. But only five years ago (or is it seven?), she shared a bed with Ravi Choudhury, Labour counsellor in the Gorbals. Her third and last husband, Bill Cochrane, dear man that he was, had lost interest in her in that way, by then, and didn’t care. Dead, both of them, now, of course.
Recently, cajoled by her favourite stepdaughter, Flora saw an American movie, which, silly piece of nonsense though it was, has stayed with her. Increasing evidence of brain decay, she supposes, or of the way humans grasp after comfort in the face of the unknown. The film was a piece of fluff about a young widow who falls in love with the ghost of a sea captain. She agreed to see it purely because the title, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, suggested Scottishness (it wasn’t, of course). Realising that their love could never be, the ghost nobly gave her up and pushed her into the arms of the living man who was pursuing her, which worked out badly. On the widow’s deathbed, after a lifetime of implied chastity, the ghost popped up again and off they walked, hand in hand, she restored to youth and beauty. (There was no mention of the ghost of her husband, or what he thought about this.) The moral of the story seemed to be that sacrifice is pointless – a sentiment Flora heartily agrees with. Ridiculous as it was, the story moved her. In more fanciful moments, she muses, Would any of them come back for her? Who would it be?
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Increasingly, Flora seems to have acquired her own private, involuntary movie theatre. Whereas, once, her mind moved along sane, predictable paths (as befitted a scientist), now it lies in wait to spring at her. Great blocks of memory drop without warning into her consciousness, vivid and all-consuming. She has grown wary, as she never knows what may ambush her and hold her in thrall: a face; the taste of blubber; the sound of dogs; the voluptuous dream from the plane.
The memories, most often, come from long ago; she is immersed in sights and feelings from her childhood in Greenland: being carried on a dogsled, snow crystals stinging her face, the air burning her throat . . .
Or, the dear Vega: the slosh of waves against the hull, the eager motion; catching the thread of Ian Sellar’s voice in the weft of noise . . . how it plucks at her, makes her body resonate like a harp . . . Oh, what if Ian were to come back for her, fulfil her vague, adolescent yearnings? Only a few years after that voyage, he was dead: drowned in a cold sea. All that wasted beauty . . .
Or, again . . . crawling down the entrance of an illu, she collides, head on, with Simiak, who laughs at Flora’s horror and consternation. (Simiak rubs her head and strokes her hair, and twelve-year-old Flora bursts into tears, though not with pain.)
No, she wants none of those. In a hotel in Liverpool, it is, simply, the green, glossy texture of bathroom tiles under her hands, beaded and sweating with condensation, accompanied by unspeakable joy . . .
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‘Mrs Cochrane, did you have a nice rest?’
Flora glares at the young man. Youth is no excuse for rudeness. But he is smiling that engaging smile, galloping down the corridor behind her like a dog that has spied a ball.
‘Hello, Mr Crane.’ (Since she remembers his name, she is damn well going to use it.) ‘Thank you, yes. Did you?’
‘Erm . . . yes – well, I was working – making some notes, you know, for the article. Could I get you a drink before dinner?’
Flora supposes that he could. It is a long time since an attractive young man offered to buy her a drink (although ‘fetch’ is probably the operative word, rather than ‘buy’), and she is not so discomfited by the surroundings, or her memories, or even his ulterior motives, whatever they are, that she will not enjoy the attention. He is so young – mid-twenties, at most. The same age she was when she was exploring. How ridiculously young she had been, and thrust into leading a group of men, all older than herself . . . How had she dared? He is just a boy: cocky enough on the surface, but surely, underneath, wondering when he will be found out.
Outside the uncurtained window, it is still twilight; it will not be truly dark for hours. Every time she looks up, more stars have appeared, quietly emerging from the depths of space, populating the empty quarters of the cyan heaven. Once, the place they are going to was designated ‘Unexplored Regions’ – a white blank on the maps. Now, the only unexplored regions left are up there.
Not so strange, really, to have had that dream, since it is associated with where they are going. She sees the glossy, dark eyes of the fox that used to visit them in the valley. It would sit, fearlessly, and stare at their strange, human behaviour. She had named it Imaqa, the Eskimo word for ‘maybe’. Im-mah-ka . . .
‘Excuse me?’
Sometimes the memory-theatre coexists with the person present, as though she stands amid a crowd of ghosts.
‘Oh . . . nothing.’ Flora smiles. ‘I must warn you, Mr Crane, that you begin to talk to yourself as you get older.’
Randall Crane grins back at her. A conspiratorial smile, a kind one.
‘I think I do that already.’
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They are in the cheerless lounge bar of Gander airbase. A large, square room with an low ceiling, filled with uncomfortably low chairs. He asks her about Lester Armitage, what she remembers of him. Flora gathers her thoughts. Of course, he wants something from her. Armitage . . . Increasingly difficult to keep things in the order in which they happened. They come instead in fragments, or in avalanches.
‘Mr Armitage? Well . . . of course, I met him in ’92. On my first expedition.’
‘Ah! I don’t remember that from his book.’
‘I don’t think he mentioned it.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘Shortly after we arrived in Greenland – that is, I, Dr Seddon, Mr Dixon and Mr Daneforth – we went to visit the American party. They were on the point of leaving. We wanted to pay our respects, of course, and see what we could find out – where they had been, what they had done and so on.’
Flora remembers – but finds it hard to believe – how nervous she had been at the prospect of meeting Armitage. He did nothing to allay her discomfort.
‘Etiquette demands that you do not ask such questions too directly. Separate expeditions are, on the face of it, colleagues; but, of course, you’re also rivals.’
‘Ah . . . yes.’ Young Crane looks interested, leaning forward in his chair. ‘What were your impressions of Armitage?’
Flora recalls a large, gingery moustache and disconcerting eyes. Forbidding: that is the word she associates with Armitage. She had disliked him from the start.
‘He was a determined man. Very serious. Very . . . ambitious.’
‘Did he help you, with what you wanted to know?’
‘Oh, they were quite frank – up to a point. Of course, they were a year ahead of us, and had done very well. We stayed the night; we’d walked twenty miles to see them. They gave us dinner and breakfast.’
‘So you talked about the work they had done?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which was?’
‘I’m sure you’ve read Armitage’s book . . . They told us about the two journeys they made, as detailed there. There was no conflict of interest – our focus was on scientific work; theirs was to explore.’
‘Did you like him?’
Flora pauses. ‘People have asked me many things over the years, but I don’t think anyone has ever asked me if I liked Lester Armitage.’
‘Oh.’ Randall Crane seems unabashed. ‘Well, did you?’
‘I respected him. He was driven and organised. Rather standoffish. But then, we were the competition.’
‘So he was competitive?’
‘We were all competitive, Mr Crane. Explorers may dress their ambitions in patriotic or scientific garb, but in the end, it tends to come down to personal glory. Well . . . or escape. Glory, or escape.’
‘You think Armitage was for glory?’
‘If you’re interested in him, you must have read his book.’
Randall laughs. ‘Yes. I suppose that comes across. And Jakob de Beyn – which was it for him?’
Flora takes a sip of her gimlet. The colour reminds her of an ice cave – the ice cave: the high, light chamber at the glacier’s inmost heart. The sun glared off the ice on the surface, and the cavern ceiling glowed with an exquisite green light. She closes her eyes, feeling dizzy. She imagines the Vitamin C (whatever that is) coursing through her veins and in some way, she hopes, fortifying them.
‘A Scottish invention, Rose’s Lime Juice – did you know that?’
‘I didn’t. I would’ve thought . . . the Caribbean, somewhere like that.’
‘It was invented for the Royal Navy. To reduce dependence on rum, I imagine.’
‘Ah?’ He waits.
‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to forgive me.’
‘Of course . . . Was that the only time you met Armitage?’
‘They were on the point of leaving Greenland. In the north, you know, one time seems much like another. It isn’t like London or New York, where they put up a new building, or tear an old one down. It doesn’t change. Or it didn’t use to. Now, I think, even there, modern life has caught up with them. Mr Armitage didn’t like me. I think my presence in the north was, to him, a kind of insult.’
‘Oh. Why an insult?’
She wonders if he is really dense, or whether this is just the way with journalists.
‘Because my presence in Greenland made being there seem easy. If a woman could explore, could do those things, he could no longer feel himself to be remarkable.’
Randall shrugs. ‘Could it not be that you too were remarkable?’
‘Thank you, Mr Crane. But all we were doing was living and travelling in a place where men and women passed their whole lives. Children grew up there. We were simply unused to it. Our being there was not remarkable. Getting there, for any of us – that was the remarkable part.’
‘You mean, the journey, at that time?’
‘No. Heavens! The voyage was a few weeks. No, I mean raising an expedition. Finding the money, organising it. The credit for that, in my case, was due entirely to my then husband, Mr Athlone. As we used to say, any fool can put on warm clothes and eat and walk.’
‘Your husband was supposed to accompany you on that first expedition, I believe. May I ask what happened?’
‘You have done your research. Yes, he was. There was bad weather on the journey out, and he had a fall. He broke his pelvis. He never fully recovered.’
‘Ah. I’m sorry. That must have been very difficult.’
Flora pictures Maurice Seddon’s face in the governor’s house at Godthåb. Freddie, cocooned by morphine, urged them to go on. She was supposed to disagree. Maurice stared at her as though she had become a monster, when she should have been a nurse.
‘Abandoning the expedition was out of the question. One goes into such debt, you understand. It was felt that we should continue, with myself as leader. Without that accident, things would have been very different. Circumstances conspired to thrust me into that role.’
‘So, the men on the expedition – you had no difficulties with them?’
‘They behaved very well. They felt they owed it to Freddie, I think . . . to Mr Athlone.’
She looks to see if he believes this. He nods sympathetically.
‘To you too, I’m sure. You went back again, with some of the same men. So you clearly succeeded. Not all your contemporaries can have felt as Mr Armitage did – about your being there, I mean.’
‘Well, they didn’t all give that impression. Perhaps they hid it better.’
Randall laughs, then looks at her coyly.
‘De Beyn and Armitage were colleagues on that expedition. Did you meet him at the same time?’
‘Dr Seddon and I met all the Americans; there was Mr de Beyn, Mr Erdinger, the physicist, of course, who became so well known, and Dr Urbino. And Mr . . . Shull? If I remember rightly.’
‘What was your impression of de Beyn?’
‘De Beyn? He was interested in photography. Dr Seddon shared that interest. I remember them talking about the problems of photographing ice. He was an old friend of Dr Urbino. He was greatly affected by his death. You know about that, I’m sure.’
‘I read the account in Armitage’s book. But what were your impressions of him as a man?’
Flora looks at the ceiling, as though searching her memory. What can she say?
‘De Beyn? Well, the most striking thing about him was his hair, which was quite grey – prematurely, of course. He called it his winter plumage. But you mean, in character, I suppose? He was friendly . . . spirited. He and Dr Urbino were the most welcoming.’
‘It sounds as though you liked him.’
Why is he so interested in de Beyn? As opposed to any of the others?
‘I did. He didn’t condescend, like Armitage . . . But these were superficial impressions, remember, from fifty years ago.’
‘Oh, sure. I don’t suppose . . . did you form any sense of how the two of them got on?’
‘Heavens, I hardly . . . You have to understand that there is no privacy there. That’s how the Eskimos live – in public. One always wears a public face. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I think so. Isn’t that how we all live, though, wherever we are?’
‘Yes, but up there it is total. If you’re in a hut, or an illu, you are with ten or twelve other people, all piled on top of each other. You are never alone. It’s hardly conducive to
confidences.’
‘You make it sound oppressive.’
‘People think the north is all wide open spaces and pure white snow; solitude . . . freedom, but, in some ways, it’s quite the opposite. There’s certainly no clean white snow anywhere near a village!’
‘But you must have liked it; you spent so much time there.’
‘Yes. But it’s not some primitive Utopia – noble savages living in harmony, that sort of thing. You see those stars there – go left from Orion’s belt – one above the other?’
She points at the window; Canis Minor is clear beyond.
‘The Eskimos call that constellation ‘sikuliaqsuijuittuq’. They have a story about a hunter who took more than his fair share of meat. That’s not a joke to them. They drove him out on to the summer ice; he was too heavy and fell through, and drowned. That’s him up there – the Murdered Man. A reminder of their justice.’
Crane smiles politely. Flora wonders if she is trying to frighten him.
‘So Armitage and de Beyn—’
Flora sighs. ‘What is your interest, Mr Crane? Do you plan to write about them? Are you going to quote me?’
Randall smiles, and looks down at his drink. ‘I don’t exactly know what my plan is. It rather depends.’
‘On what? Do you expect me to provide solutions to old mysteries?’
‘I don’t hope for that much! Of course, I wouldn’t use anything you said unless you agreed to it.’
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The bar doors swing open with a burst of male voices, and a number of uniforms come in, winking with braid and medals. Their commander comes over and greets Flora with effusive courtesy.
‘Good evening, Commander Soames. I’m fine, thank you. Mr Crane was asking me how I survived as a woman in the Arctic among all those male explorers.’
