by Laline Paull
‘You know?’ He stared at his ex-wife. ‘How? I only just found out.’
‘Ruth called me.’ She stood back to let him in. ‘Crack of dawn.’ She almost smiled. ‘Ruth Mott?’
‘They told her first.’ Sean was assaulted by the smell of home. The old oak floors and stairs, the extortionate beeswax polish. He noticed a bowl of orange roses on the table. ‘You cut the Whisky Macs.’ They always left them blooming on the path, for visitors to enjoy their scent.
‘Saves them from the rain. Someone called her from Svalbard: Tom named her next of kin, apparently. But you already knew that.’
Sean touched a rose and its petals dropped. ‘I don’t remember every single detail of that time.’
‘I do … But they saw each other, didn’t they? That one last time.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t realise she was officially … next of kin.’
Sean disliked the idea of Ruth Mott relating her version of that last night. But that was the only way Gail could know, because at the time they were in the final throes of nisi to absolute, and only their lawyers were speaking. He looked up the stairs. Someone else was in the house, he could feel it.
‘Whose silver car is that out there?’
‘The colour’s called mineral white. And it’s mine.’
‘You said you wanted to keep the Saab forever.’
‘If it kept working I would have. But: it didn’t. Apparently this new one’s attached to a satellite, so I’m tracked from space if I want and even if I don’t, unless I sit down online for hours and work out how to switch it off. It’s got this inbuilt …’
She tailed off because Sean wasn’t listening. His attention was caught by all the changes in his old home that he could feel but not quite identify. He stared at the cut roses then looked away. It didn’t matter any more.
‘I’m glad you’ve got yourself a good car.’
‘I took advice.’
She’d moved the pictures around. There was a new light on a table. Tom was dead, that was why he’d come. So that Gail could express his grief. She wasn’t doing that properly.
‘You and Ruth have made up then.’
‘I hope so. I – I was unfair to her.’
‘She shouldn’t have meddled.’
‘She knows. And I should have listened.’
Alarmed by the tremble in her voice, he went into the kitchen. A muscle memory prompted him: dump the coat, dump the bag – he looked down at the settle. The newspapers and the big tabby cat that slept there were gone.
‘Where’s Harold?’ He looked around, making the sound that called him.
‘He died too. Last year. Tea? Coffee?’ Gail filled the kettle, her back to him.
‘You didn’t tell me.’ He couldn’t help himself, he looked around. Each thing he recognised was like an accusation. ‘Isn’t this place too big for you now?’
Gail turned. ‘Sean, why did you come? You could have phoned.’
‘That’s what Martine said.’
‘Ah. She’s so thoughtful.’
‘You don’t even seem upset about Tom. Aren’t you upset? You could have called—’ He stopped. It was obvious she was upset.
‘Yes it’s a shock and yes I’m upset, but I don’t call you any more, about anything, unless it’s Rosie. I assumed you knew.’ She did not cry. ‘So, there’ll be a funeral, what else? Your knighthood’s finally arrived?’
‘Not yet, but it will.’ He felt bewildered. Gail wasn’t like this. She was soft.
‘Your services to British business. One in the eye for my father.’
‘Here’s hoping.’ He looked away, feeling the trembling ghosts of parties and dinners, the familiar plates he’d eaten off, the cupboards that held them. The bunches of herbs hanging up. ‘The lane,’ he said abruptly. ‘It’s in a shocking state, do you want me to make a call? You’ll never get round to it and it’ll just get worse. I don’t mind.’ He wished he hadn’t said that. He hoped she would decline.
‘I know you’re a master of the universe and all that—’
‘Those are bankers, I’ve never been a banker—’
‘—but in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s been raining solidly for a month.’
‘It hasn’t rained a drop in London.’
‘I don’t care what happens in London! You can’t grade a flooded lane, you have to wait for it to drain. It’s all organised. But thank you for pointing it out.’
‘So you’re OK then. Not – clinically depressed.’
‘Sorry to tell you, I’m absolutely fine.’ She wiped her eyes, her back to him.
‘Is that Sean?’ His daughter Rosie swerved round the kitchen door in a long T-shirt that said OCCUPY, and her honey brown hair ruined into dreadlocks. Her ears were multiply pierced, and to his dismay, he noticed another tribal tattoo on her upper arm.
‘Rosie,’ he groaned. ‘What have you done to yourself?’
‘Grown up without you? Why is Mum crying? Sean, why are you even here?’ Rosie put her arm around her mother and glared at him.
‘I’m fine,’ said Gail, ‘really. We’re just talking.’
‘And I don’t like you calling me that,’ he said. ‘I’m still your father.’
‘Uh-uh, you sacked yourself. A father is someone you’re supposed to be able to trust, who gives his word and keeps it, who doesn’t cheat and lie again and again, when they’ve promised not to. Mum cries every day you know.’
‘Oh for goodness sake, I do not—’
‘My god! Why does everybody lie the whole time?’
‘Some day, Rosie,’ he said, ‘you might understand that things are not always black and—’
‘White,’ she finished for him, ‘I know. They’re in the grey, and in the grey, Rosie, is where people like me make their money and tell their lies and generally screw up other people’s lives. In the grey. I’ve got it. Sean.’
‘She doesn’t know,’ Gail said quietly.
‘Know what? Ugh: you’re expecting a little bébé with her. Well it’s never going to have anything to do with me.’
‘No, that’s not why I’ve come, and I didn’t know you were here, I thought it was term time. I came to tell your mother that Tom’s body has been found. And in person, Rosie, not to be insulted by you but to break it gently to her. Except she already knew.’
Rosie stared at her mother in shock.
‘Ruth called me this morning.’ Gail put her arm round her daughter. ‘I’ll tell you all about it.’ She looked at Sean over Rosie’s shoulder. ‘Thank you for coming. I appreciate it.’
He stared at his crying daughter, and his stranger of an ex-wife. He was being dismissed from his own home. Ex-home.
‘Rosie,’ he said gently, ‘if you ever wanted to see me—’
‘Why would I want to do that?’ She didn’t look at him.
‘Because you’re my daughter and I love you.’
‘Don’t hold your breath.’ She ducked out from under her mother’s arm and ran upstairs, her face crumpling.
The Vanquish blinked an electronic greeting. Sean drove carefully down the rutted, waterlogged private lane, then into the long single-lane road. The numbness was definitely gone, the encounter with his ex-wife and his daughter left him raw with failure. He had wanted to comfort them—
A short sharp blast of a horn ahead returned his attention to the narrow road, where a battered red Land Rover pulling a trailer was upon him. A man and a woman in matching jackets – James and Emma Goring. OK, he could do this. He’d only just gone by a passing place so he waved then reversed, shaking himself out of his funk, ready to greet them. The shattered bones of the past, knitting back together. He would tell them what had happened.
James and Emma – he couldn’t remember their children’s names – but over nearly a decade they had eaten at each other’s houses, bought rounds at the Acorn, gone to firework parties, shared New Year – the stuff of life that slowly accretes into friendship. He felt better for seeing them, but they did not appear to
recognise him. In fact, James raised a casual finger of thanks and was about to drive on, until Sean called out.
James did a double-take, and stopped. ‘Sean!’ he said. Emma lowered the phone she had been checking, and just that second also officially recognised him too, with a bright smile.
Engines running, they exchanged enthusiastic concerns about the weather and the state of the lanes, and Sean told them about the dust storm, which they’d seen on TV but only got a little of here, weren’t they lucky with their microclimate? And then the awkward pause.
Sean knew they wanted to go. He felt angry, he kept them talking, anything, about the vineyards, the farm, while he absorbed the fact they hadn’t wanted to stop. Pretending they hadn’t recognised him. People got divorced, people moved on – he looked pointedly at their trailer, where big sound speakers were covered with a tarp.
‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Your solstice party – here’s hoping for sunshine!’
‘Oh,’ James said quickly, ‘very small this year.’
‘Big speakers, for a small party.’
‘Not really.’
They looked at each other, their smiles fading. They were not going to invite him.
‘I came down to tell Gail a dear friend of ours died.’ Sean had to look up at them from his lower vehicle. ‘You should know we’re still friends.’
‘Best way,’ said James. ‘Sorry for your loss.’
‘Absolutely,’ Emma said. ‘So sorry. Take care, Sean.’
James put the Land Rover in gear and the loaded trailer rattled dangerously close to the Aston as they passed, attention fixed on the lane ahead. Then they were gone.
Sean stared after them in the rear-view mirror, his heart pounding like he’d been in a fight. He’d thought of them as friends – he’d brought out his best wine and put up with their tedious company in the hope that they would surely reveal themselves at some point – he presumed it was just that English reserve—
No. They had never been friends; they had always been cold to him. It was Gail they’d liked, he knew they thought she’d married down. The loss of Tom burned through him again: Tom who had been a true friend and a gentleman, always showing the same kindness and self-respect whether he was talking to a tramp or a billionaire. Sean heard Kingsmith’s voice in his head, from the old days, when he’d taken a business loss. Learn, and don’t look back. He checked the time, and told the satnav Heathrow.
There is a power that we call Sila, which is not to be explained in simple words. A great spirit, supporting the world and the weather and all life on earth, a spirit so mighty that his utterance to mankind is not through common words, but by storm and snow and rain and the fury of the sea; all the forces of nature that men fear.
When all is well, Sila sends no message to mankind, but withdraws into his own endless nothingness, apart. So he remains as long as men do not abuse life, but act with reverence towards their daily food.
No one has seen Sila; his place of being is a mystery, in that he is at once among us and unspeakably far away.
Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition (1927)
Knud Rasmussen
4
Sitting in 1F, crammed against the plastic wall, the smell of his neighbour’s duty-free aftershave in his nose, Sean remembered Tom’s grim prediction that Svalbard would become the Ibiza of the north. The midnight sun, exotic locale, and public awareness of the fragility of the region had created the strongest driver for tourism the Arctic had ever seen. Now Longyearbyen even had its own club scene, the most popular being the dance bar Extinction, a Mecca for outward-bound hen and stag parties and rich kids bored of skiing.
Sean watched the stewardess and her cart coming closer. The clink of ice made him swallow in anticipation. A shocking event, but with it, closure. A stone – a literal heavy headstone, could be laid on Tom’s recovered body in its grave, and on the hope he would return. Or if he were cremated, maybe a cairn, a rough and enduring memorial. He grimaced at the stupid thought. The Arctic could not be transplanted.
‘Sir, any drinks or snacks?’ the stewardess repeated, with an economy-class smile. She passed him his two miniature vodkas, tin of tonic and a plastic cup with a single ice cube and moved on quickly before he could ask for more. He didn’t bother with the tonic, just poured in both vodkas and knocked it back, staring out at the clouds. No. No matter what Kingsmith and Martine said, in his heart he knew this was anything but closure. He’d learned to live with the idea of Tom lost in pristine obscurity – that was how many Arctic heroes ended their story. His reappearance was unscripted, as if the glacier itself had moved against him.
Another shadow fell on his thoughts, provoked by Gail’s reference to his still-imminent knighthood. The New Year and Birthday honours had come and gone three times, but there was always a good reason he had to wait – bit of a backlog, wheels within wheels, don’t worry—
No no, he didn’t worry, he was patient. He knew how to be a good chap not a chippy upstart, how to keep his eyes on the prize – there was a verbal deal and he had more than fulfilled his side of it – but that didn’t mean he wasn’t getting impatient and resentful that he was being strung along, even while he put on a good face, and waited. He didn’t even know when he’d started wanting it, but now he’d been promised—
He guessed why it hadn’t yet materialised: there were questions about the accident. Two men go into the glacier, only one comes out. He twisted around to see where the stewardess had got to – he needed his fighting spirit. All right then, let the inquest lance that boil of suspicion, which had been far worse than any outright accusation he could refute. What happened? In detail? He’d tell them whatever they wanted to know and as he publicly cleared his name, he would also remind the world that risk and danger were at the very heart of exploration and even to this day the fittest and best-prepared polar adventurers still sometimes died. Surviving was not a crime.
But Sean had done more than just survive; he was making a fine living from Midgard Lodge, where the beloved Tom Harding had died. An aggrieved journalist, turned down for membership at Sean’s other clubs, had written about Midgard and called it ‘Dirty Davos’. This was not entirely untrue. Sean Cawson’s group of membership clubs around the world catered to a global elite, but Midgard Lodge was different. The northernmost hostelry in the world and converted from an old whaling station, it was inaccessible to all but its guests, and provided for those who valued discretion, whose reputations were perhaps not the holiest, but who wanted to improve their standing in the world as well as their profits. These were the people about whom the World Economic Forum felt squeamish, who would never be invited to actual Davos, but whose decisions were of great economic and political import. If they were excluded from the best business society – publicly, at least – they were welcome to meet, and talk, and explore different business models in the stunning environment of Midgard Lodge. Sean believed and Tom had agreed that it was pointless preaching to the converted; also that honey caught more flies than vinegar. A luxury retreat in a uniquely inspiring location, security assured, was part of the realpolitik of environmental progress.
The stewardess was at the rear of the plane. Sean turned back to the dull white clouds. A delicate thing, for a CEO to re-establish the chain of command after so long an absence – but Danny Long was clearly slipping up as general manager if he was reporting to Kingsmith first. Kingsmith might have recommended him, but he was only Sean’s sleeping partner in Midgard, not an official shareholder like Martine and her clean-tech investors, or Radiance Young and her friends in Hong Kong. Sean always smiled at the thought of Radiance and her bare-faced insistence she was investing all her own renminbis, not those of the People’s Republic behind her. Fine, if that was what she needed to say. But she certainly brought the Party with her.
It would probably be a few days before details were released to the press and then the news cycle and the eulogising would start up again. ‘Glacier gives up the g
host’, or more soberly, ‘Body of missing British environmentalist discovered’. As if Tom Harding were Franklin’s lost expedition, the subject of national mourning for decades. And then, of course, there would be the pictures. Tom shaking hands with indigenous protestors at the line of jungle they had saved. Tom swimming with that bloody whale shark, as if he were the only person in the world ever to do that. Tom with actors draped on his shoulders, celebrity trading for rugged moral virtue.
The prospect of reliving the cult of Tom was as irritating now as it had been while he was alive, but the worst of it was, Tom had disliked it too. Sean couldn’t even call him on his ego – or his looks, which were not his fault. Women adored him, men admired him, and this idolisation was a large part of why Sean had so doggedly courted him for Midgard, refusing to take no for an answer. But it wasn’t the whole of it. Despite their years of distance, Sean knew that if Tom believed in Midgard, then he had truly created something of real value to this world. His old friend’s approval had really mattered – and Kingsmith was right, he must get out in front of all this. He must gather up all his energy and use the drama positively.
In the aftermath of the accident Sean had given interviews, written his own account of it and set up a foundation in Tom’s name that gave far more generously than most corporate social responsibility departments of far larger organisations. Now he must do it all again, but instead of telling the truth: No More Sea Ice! The Arctic Open for Business! Governments form an orderly queue! – he would have to deliver environmental pieties that made even his interviewer’s eyes glaze over.
‘Don’t make people feel guilty,’ Tom had insisted. ‘It’s not fair and it shuts them down. That’s the big trick of the all-deniers: make it your fault, not the governments that won’t stand up to business and the bullshitting politicians sitting on the boards of fossil fuel companies.’ And Sean had listened to Tom go on for a while, amazed at how his friend had changed. He was impassioned and unstoppable.
