The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  There was a collective wincing in the room.

  “But did you know what they were?” asked Stanley, the frost in his voice giving way to genuine disbelief.

  “Not at first, but then the waiter told me.”

  “I’d have shot him,” said Stanley.

  “More than once, sir,” added Barber in a shaky voice.

  “When he told me,” explained Sugden, twisting one hand in the air, “well I just thought, You’ve gone this far, you might as well finish the job. So I ate the lot. And I tell you, they were marvelous. They give you strength, apparently. They’ll even cure you if you’re ill. What do you think of that?” he called across to Stanley, convinced he now had the upper hand.

  “I have never yet exclaimed ‘Heavens to Betsy,’” replied Stanley, “but I feel the time is fast approaching.”

  At that moment Sugden caught sight of me. The angle of my chair had almost kept me hidden. His already squinting eyes narrowed even further.

  Now the sickness I had felt before grew so strong that I could barely breathe. The reason he had such an effect on me was simple.

  Sugden and I were the only survivors of one of the worst mountaineering disasters to take place during the war. As leader of that group, I had been cleared of wrongdoing by a board of inquiry. The board was by headed by none other than Henry Carton, who even saw to it that I was awarded a medal. But as far as Wally Sugden was concerned, the blame for what went wrong still lay upon me. No board of inquiry or medal on my chest could change Sugden’s mind, and the fact that I no longer climbed only strengthened his conviction.

  In truth, Sugden was right. I did blame myself for what happened. It didn’t matter if the army had acquitted me, because I could not acquit myself. I had been over it a thousand times in my head and even if I could not imagine making different decisions than the ones I’d made, I had still made them and those men, who had been some of my closest friends, had still died. Even the thought of it was more than I could bear, so I had imprisoned all those memories deep in the dungeons of my brain. That was why I no longer climbed. I knew that the feel of the ropes, the sound of hidden streams beneath the rocks, the scrabble of boots over wet stone, and the pain in my fingers from gripping tiny ledges would bring those memories back into the light. Then I would become their prisoner, and not the other way around.

  I had tried to convince myself that I’d put the whole business behind me, and that those images had perished in their walled-in prison cells. But the sight of Wally Sugden, and the dread it woke inside, told me the pictures were still alive, still dangerous, scrabbling at the walls as they attempted to escape.

  Sugden had finally had enough of Stanley’s jibes. “I was wondering,” he said in a voice everyone could hear, “whether you and your friend might like to come along.”

  “Come along where?” asked Stanley.

  “Why, to Patagonia of course!”

  The blood drained out of Stanley’s face. He tried without success to assume an air of nonchalance. “We don’t climb anymore,” he said casually. “We are the—”

  “‘The Society of Former Mountaineers,’” said Sugden. “Yes, I know what you call yourselves. But why bother with such a long name when one word would do to sum it up?”

  Everyone knew what that one word was meant to be. Sugden was calling us cowards.

  This time Stanley had no answer for him.

  Sugden turned away and smiled and faced the room. “I’ll see you when I get back!” he shouted triumphantly.

  Another burst of applause. Now the room became very lively.

  In the midst of this, I stepped out to get some air. The once-happy thrumming of the red wine had now become an annoyance. I wanted it to go away. I muttered something to myself about the world getting itself all back-to-front, and the reason for my going into the Montague being to escape from the very confusion that I was now leaving the club to avoid.

  I stood there on the sidewalk, as men and women stepped past me on their way home from work. Raincoats swished about their knees and umbrellas tilted down over their faces. The sound of their shuffling feet merged with the rumble of passing cars.

  I looked down the avenue, mesmerized by the silver lights of oncoming vehicles and the red dots of taillights from cars speeding in the opposite direction. In the murky dusk, the glow of those lights linked together until they became like two necklaces, one of pearls and one of rubies, laid side by side across the grayness of the city.

  The sight of it unsettled me, but I could not understand why. Everywhere around me, colors began to throb. Solid objects rippled, transforming themselves into nightmarish creatures. I realized I was sweating. The evening breeze cooled the moisture on my face, but instead of soothing me, it felt as if my skin were being eaten away. My vision tunneled, then snapped back to normal and slowly began tunneling again. Everything began to fall apart, as if the entire planet had suddenly come loose from its path across the universe. The comfortable world I thought I knew was sliding away into darkness. I felt myself carried along with it, like a passenger on the deck of a sinking ship.

  The next thing I knew, I was lying in the street.

  The old woman was staring down at me. Pale, inquisitive faces clustered behind her.

  Beyond them, raindrops fell from the twilight sky.

  “Is he dead?” the woman asked.

  “No,” I replied. “He is not.”

  TWO

  THE NEXT MORNING, having decided to spend the weekend at my father’s place in the country, I strolled along the platform at Paddington Station towards a west-bound train. The place echoed with the sound of voices and machines. People weaved among spider-webbed shadows cast down from the glass roof high above. My eyes fastened onto moments plucked out of the chaos:

  An old man in a worn green mackintosh, having set down two suitcases, takes off his cap, retrieves a handkerchief, and wipes the sweat from his forehead.

  A newspaper vendor announcing that the government of South Korea is evacuating the city of Seoul, and mispronouncing the word as See-owl.

  A young man with short red hair and a scar on his cheek hugs a woman maybe fifteen years older than himself. She kisses him on the mouth. Two old ladies are standing nearby, both wearing hats with silk flowers on the brims. One of the old ladies looks away but the other stares at the couple kissing.

  A man my age is sitting at a table in the tea shop. He is reading a book and stirring his tea at the same time.

  These pictures and sounds all vanished in a blur as I hopped aboard the 9:05 express train bound for Swindon. There, I would change to a smaller train that would take me as far as Stroud, in Gloucestershire. From Stroud, I would find a taxi to Painswick, where my father lived and where I was born. Or perhaps I would walk, as I did when I came home from the war. I would never forget the sound of my hobnailed boots on the road that morning as the sun rose, nor the sweet and heavy scent of elder flowers growing in the mist-clogged hedges, and the pink foxgloves which speckled my trench coat with dew as I brushed by.

  I was always glad to get out of the city on the morning train, and treated myself to breakfast in the dining car. I carefully sipped my tea and spread marmalade on racks of toast while the countryside of Berkshire rattled past. I looked out at the luminous yellow fields of rapeseed and saw the barges inching their way like giant river rats along the soupy green water of the canals.

  At the Stroud station, I paused to roll a cigarette beside a wall which, during the war, had been decorated with a recruiting poster that read, “Have You Done Your Bit?” in bold red letters. The picture was of an officer, of course, who appeared to be returning on leave, or perhaps at the end of his service. He wore a soft-peaked cap and a heavy overcoat, and had a pipe jutting from his mouth. At his feet lay a half-open pack, bulging with various war souvenirs—a German helmet, a Luger, and a pair of binoculars. But it was his smile that I remembered most clearly. It was a peaceful, sleepy grin, like that of a cat on a windowsill on a sunny
afternoon. It was the smile of not being in danger anymore. The smile of going home. That poster went up in the first year of the war and remained up until it was so faded and torn that the soldier had almost disappeared. But each time I passed by, I remembered his smile and hoped that it would be on my face someday soon.

  It was late in the afternoon before I reached Stroud, so I opted for a taxi to take me on to Painswick. My father’s place stood smack in the middle of the village, opposite a greengrocer’s shop, which put on a seasonal firework display of bright green leeks, baskets of cherries, tomatoes, or the shimmering feathers of pheasants, gunned in the woods up near the village of Slad.

  My father had lived here all his life. Before retiring, he had taught for twenty-five years at the local school. During that time he had been a heavy smoker but the day he quit teaching, he threw away his cigarettes and never touched the stuff again. All that remained of those years of tobacco and chalk dust was a clock on the mantelpiece, given as a token of thanks by the school board, and a yellow stain on the ceiling above his reading chair, from all the years of rising fumes.

  Until I went away to school at the age of seven, this village was my home. After that, even though I returned for every holiday and could have found my way around the place blindfolded, it never felt like home again.

  I fished the key out of the flowerpot beside the front door and let myself in. The back door was open, and I could see right through the darkness of the house to the garden, where my father sat on a three-legged wooden stool. His eyes were closed, chin lifted towards the afternoon sun, which made his face look as if it had been hammered from a sheet of burnished copper.

  “Hello, Dad!” I shouted as I walked across the brick-red floor, trying not to chip the tiles with the iron-shod heels of my boots.

  He turned his head sleepily towards the sound of my voice. “Is that you, William?”

  My father seemed to be getting thinner these days, both his body and his hair. Elaborate attempts to comb it into seeming as if he had plenty left only made his scalp more obvious. He wore heavy clothes, no matter what the weather: flannel shirts and tweed waistcoats with horn buttons and a stiff oilcloth jacket when he went striding up and down the lanes.

  I saw myself in the color of his eyes, in the shape of his lips, and in the way he stood when he was thinking, hands in pockets, staring at the ground, heels touching, one foot pointing forward and the other almost to the side.

  “Is it the holidays already?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said, dumping my pack and stepping out into the garden. Sunlight glared off the yellow Cotswold stone. I sat on the edge of the garden wall and stretched and yawned. “I’m just down for the weekend. Taking a break from the city.”

  “You wouldn’t catch me going up to London. Dirty, smelly place.” My father had a loathing of the city. To him, it existed as a kind of twilight realm, dislodged from the rhythms of the natural world; a place where people went who had died but did not yet know they were dead.

  “I fainted the other day,” I said, changing the subject.

  “Did you?” His hands rested on his legs, fingers dangling down over his knees.

  “I don’t know what happened.” I shook my head.

  “Cup of tea?” he asked.

  “Yes, all right.”

  He stood and slapped the dust of gardening off his large hands. “I’ve been sorting out the beans,” he said, nodding at the trellis he had made on which the plants were climbing. “They’ve got to have everything just right or they won’t grow, and every year they want it a different way and I’ve got to figure out what that is.”

  “Yes,” I said vaguely.

  As he headed into the kitchen, my father rested a hand on my shoulder. “Welcome back.” Then came the noisy splash of him filling the kettle. I watched him scooping the tea from the tea tin, using a broad spoon made of brass. He leveled off the spoonful with a slow sweep of his index finger. Then he lit the gas on the stove and rested the kettle on the whispering ring of blue flame. Taking two mugs off the shelf, he turned them right side up and brought them to rest upon the bare wood kitchen table, which had not seen a tablecloth since the day my mother died.

  We never talked about my mother.

  My father woke up one morning thirty years ago and she was lying dead beside him, having suffered a stroke in the night. She was buried in the Painswick churchyard, with its finely sculpted trees which reminded me of poodles with silly haircuts.

  My mother left behind the ghosts of her habits: the precise way blankets were folded, canned goods stored alphabetically, clothes hung out to dry, and different china patterns used for different days of the week. Slowly, my father had exorcised these ghosts, replacing her habits with the simpler efficiency of his own.

  These days, my father and I got along well enough, but we got along as strangers do. When he sent me away to the Dragon and Eton, it had the effect of alienating him from his colleagues at the local school. My father understood that this was likely to happen, and when it did, he bore it well, believing his sacrifice to be worthwhile. What he had not understood, since he had not gone to these places, was that by sending me away to live among people so different than himself he acquired a son even more estranged from him than he was from his resentful colleagues.

  The water in the kettle sighed as it drew near to boiling.

  My father stood in the doorway to the garden, hands in the pockets of his heavy corduroy trousers, whose lines and rich brown color were like the furrows of a freshly ploughed field. He rolled his neck, cracking the joints of his spine beneath the weathered skin. “You ought to stay longer,” he told me. “For good, I mean. There’s jobs for you here, and I don’t just mean in teaching.”

  Although my father made a valiant attempt to hide the fact, he was clearly disappointed that I had become a teacher. Somehow, my having chosen the same profession as his own seemed to undermine all the sacrifices he had made on my behalf. He refused to believe that I actually liked teaching, since he had grown to loathe his work years before he’d actually retired. But he’d stuck with the job, because he could do it and didn’t have to think about it much.

  It was not like that for me. I enjoyed the pace of life at school, and the way my duties bounced from the classroom to the sports field to St. Vernon’s Officer Cadet Corps. The “Corps” amounted to fifty spotty-faced boys who, if they had been born ten years earlier, would have been made into second lieutenants, posted off to various regiments, sent to the front, and, with few exceptions, would have ended up as names on war memorials.

  As an officer in the Corps, most of my duties involved having lunch with visiting officers who were scouting out talent for their own regiments. They would be given exceptionally strong gin and tonics, followed by roast beef—it was always roast beef—and very good wine in the headmaster’s private dining room. Then, after port and the best Cuban cigars, they would inspect a march-past of the cadets, say a few rousing words, and fall asleep in chauffeur-driven cars on the way back to their barracks.

  Once a term, the cadets would be trucked out to Salisbury Plain, where we would conduct map-reading exercises and stage various mock attacks on Imber village, whose inhabitants had been forcibly evicted by the army years before. Its buildings had been torn down and rebuilt in concrete, in order to be fought over by generations of soldiers in training. Of the original town, only the church remained, its cemetery overgrown and its stained-glass windows dusted green with pollen in the springtime.

  While the cadets were busy shooting one another with blank ammunition, I would sit in my rickety canvas-and-wood campaign chair outside a leaky tent. There, along with the other two officers on staff, I would make sure everything was going more or less according to plan. The other officers, both veterans of the war, were also teachers. Higgins taught math. He had a permanently reddened face and squinting eyes from his days with the Long Range Desert Group in Libya. Houseman, head of the English department, had spent several ye
ars chasing U-boats around the Mediterranean. There were times, particularly at night, when the rolling, treeless hills of Salisbury Plain would remind him of the ocean. We would sit and smoke, while Higgins would call out the eerie war cry of the Touareg tribesmen he had met in the Sand Sea of Calanscio.

  We were all slightly mad. We might have been mad before the war, but we were definitely that way now.

  The only difference between us was the way we dealt with this madness. Unlike me, Higgins and Houseman made no attempt to put the past behind them. They lived like men home on leave, with no thought of preparing for the future because, in their minds, there really was no future.

  If word had come through that the war had resumed and that they were being recalled to the front, they would have been ready to go in half an hour.

  Until then, they carried on as they had done before, suspicious of anything civilian and still speaking in the jargon of the war, with its words plucked from Urdu, Swahili, and now-outdated military terminology. For example, any foray beyond the gates of the school was referred to as a “decko” or a “shufti.” For Higgins and Houseman, these shuftis were usually to buy “zbib,” their name for alcohol, or tea, called “char,” or cigarettes, known to them as “buttys.” Occasionally, after class on a Friday afternoon, Houseman would make a decko out to see a woman, never referred to as anything other than a “bint.” Hard as he tried to keep these bint shuftis secret, the nervousness always showed on his “clock,” or face, and his usual nonchalant demeanor, standard for any British officer, was replaced by an expression Higgins called “windy.” In general, however, Higgins and Houseman spent their time contentedly within the grounds of the school, where, after Friday afternoon parade, they changed back from their uniforms into the “mufti” of regular clothes. Then they reconvened in the orderly room to drink a grueling mixture of brandy and champagne called a French 75, after the French artillery pieces which nearly finished off the Germans at Verdun, and which definitely finished off Higgins and Houseman until the start of classes on Monday morning.