‘I’d love to help.’
‘Splendid. Come on then.’
She led, chattering about her mother and their frightful journey from London in a crowded train compartment with a man who kept coughing over them. She told me that I had interesting hair and she liked it, that she already regretted choosing to study science because she wasn’t much good at practical work, she was terribly afraid that everyone would be very clever and she had promised her mother that she would join the Suffrage Society straight away, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted to join anything until she knew who was who and what was what.
‘I’m a suffragist, of course, and I can already tell that you are, but all societies and clubs have people one likes and people one can’t bear.’
As she spoke, her hands made quick, graceful gestures. I felt ungainly and awkward, found myself tongue-tied.
‘You seem very calm,’ she said. ‘How do you do it?’
I did not know how I seemed or even quite how I felt, but I had managed something at last. I had got away from home and put myself into another place.
Chapter Five
I did not know it then, but Locke was indeed to become my closest friend, and a fellow member of the Society. Our names were destined to be spoken together for years. Now it doesn’t seem enough that our rooms were close, that we shared a bench in the lab, that we met on the first day, giggled at college dances in the picture gallery when either of us had to waltz with Hester the Hippo, no, not enough to make sense of what followed. In another, wilder world we roped ourselves together, crossed crevasses, fought blizzards and we suffered our first mortal loss. How can I trace that back to the genteel surroundings of our student life, this pleasant nursery for grown women where the height of excitement was the evening cocoa party or a new fashion for pinning up one’s hair? I wish that Locke and I could have seen each other one more time before she died, had an afternoon or so of mutual forgiveness, of agreeing to put things in the past, but there it is. We did not. The Society is no more. It is all gone. And yet – the face at the scullery window. I fear that some ghost from the Society will always be with me.
The cocoa parties were strange and spirited meetings where young women discussed politics, suffrage, religion and whatever in the world needed putting right. Each evening, after dinner, we gathered in sitting rooms up and down the corridors, to better ourselves and the world, and to nurture our burgeoning friendships. We talked of flower pressing, cooking, gardening, embroidery and many other things I am sure I have forgotten. We gossiped about friends and staff, of course, and our families. If a girl had an eligible brother or two, she faced regular interrogation and was certain to receive more than the average number of invitations for the holidays. Locke and I liked to make fun of our biology lecturer, Miss Doughty, a brisk and earnest Candlin alumnus whose age could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. Locke was poor at practical work so I conducted most of her dissections and experiments while Miss Doughty seemed not to notice. She moved from bench to bench, seeing only the bones and muscles and blood, as I took my knife to a rabbit or a tortoise and Locke pretended to be searching for something in a cupboard.
Locke and I were sipping cocoa in her room after lights out one evening. Others had come and gone but we had not finished talking. She sat in her armchair with her knees up to her chest, her pea-green dress falling to the floor, her hair adorned with pretty fan-shaped combs of ivory, and I on the rug by the fire in a plain blouse and skirt, hair unpinned, as it always began to come down by the evening of its own accord. I stuck pieces of bread on toasting forks and propped them against the fireguard. Locke had a lover in London, a young actor named Horace who was playing a pirate in a West End theatre and whom she missed. They had met in the summer at a party and fallen in love playing charades. They wrote to each other almost every day, yet she had no intention of marrying him.
‘He’s handsome and I’m sure he’ll be famous one day, but I could not be the person I am with him, if I were his wife. Where would the passion go?’ She shook her head as though this were both obvious and sad, as though she had learned through years of experience, though I suspected she had picked up the comment from somebody else, perhaps her mother. ‘You must meet my family and friends in the holidays and you must meet Horace. I am sure that we could find a lover for you amongst his friends.’
‘Goodness.’ I fiddled with the hem of my blouse. Young men in the park had begun to pay me attention lately, but I always ignored them and went on my way. Locke seemed decades ahead of me. I admired her nonchalant confidence. ‘That might be nice.’ I had liked the butcher’s boy once and used to wait in the garden to see him swing through the back gate with his bicycle, gently fending off the neighbourhood cats and dogs as he took out a parcel of sausages or beef suet. I would sit by the door and hope for a smile. I had no idea whether or not I wanted a lover now, or should want one.
Locke’s sitting room was pretty with vases of flowers on every surface, elegant figurines on the shelves. The framed sketch of a male nude had hung beside her mirror but the maid reported her to the housekeeper and she was ordered to take it down or jeopardize her future at college. She promised me that it was still hanging somewhere in the room but wouldn’t tell me where. I wished I had a few secrets of my own. My notes and diaries about the Antarctic were carefully concealed so that no one would see them, but only because they would seem silly and boyish. I thought Locke the most glamorous and amusing person I had met.
We spoke in low voices so as not to disturb the student next door, Cicely Parr, a second-year and captain of the hockey team. Locke and I discussed our futures. Most Candlin students expected to teach or to marry, but Locke and I had dismissed these on our first evening at college.
‘I write plays,’ said Locke. ‘All I’m doing now is a comedy, a light-hearted farce, just to practise my skills.’
‘If I thought of working in the theatre, it would finish my parents off altogether. My mother would end up in an asylum, or try to put me in one. No, I want to see the world, places I could never get to on holiday, even if I were rich, go on ships to – as far as I can get.’
‘Ah. A sailor girl. How exciting. Men adore a woman in a sailor’s uniform and I do think it would suit you. I saw one in the theatre last year and she sang a very comical song—’
I laughed. ‘I wasn’t thinking of doing it in the music hall. I meant the sea, the real sea.’
‘But it would be much easier, and you could make a living at the same time.’
There was a rap on the door. Before we could speak, it swung open and Cicely Parr stepped in. Her hand was pressed tight against her forehead in a gesture of pain and somewhat theatrical martyrdom. She wore a flouncing white nightgown with ruffles around her neck and an odd lace cap on her head that seemed too small and gripped the skin of her forehead. She was tall, pale, pimpled and cold-looking. When Locke first saw Parr she had remarked, unkindly, that Parr looked like a corpse. There’s no blood in her, she said. She drained it out of herself.
If someone complained about noise after lights out, we had to write a letter of apology and deliver it before eight o’clock the next morning. Parr seemed uncommonly affected by noise and made regular complaints about raucous first-years. I knew her well from hockey practice and knew that she could not have cared less who liked her and who did not. She was a very separate sort of person, aloof and quite contained. She seemed not to need friends and was not always kind or friendly to her team. She ordered us around the pitch as though we were foot soldiers, screaming when we were too slow, and turning her back when we did well. Once or twice I saw her so worked up about some trivial mistake one of us had made that her eyes reddened and filled with tears. She would blink them away quickly rather than let us see her so weakened. Everything was a serious matter for Parr. I didn’t dislike her – though most of the team did – but she was a little nicer to me than to the others. We had discovered that we had both been at the Olympic Games the previous
year, in the stadium at the same time, watching Britain win the tug of war. It was hardly a strong connection but she treated me with a little more respect after that, would pass a comment at half-time, Might win this one, Farringdon, I reckon, which would not be worth noticing from anyone else but from Parr seemed like an offer of friendliness that never managed to go further.
‘Why such a din?’ She winced, fixed her eyes upon Locke.
‘We were practically whispering.’ Locke glared back.
‘I’ll go to bed now—’ I moved to stand but Locke pushed me down again.
‘Farringdon, we needn’t hurry to please someone who has entered without knocking.’
‘I knocked.’
‘You didn’t wait for an answer.’
‘For goodness’ sake. I don’t expect better from you, Locke, but, you, Farringdon, I won’t have you in my team if you can’t be responsible. I have to get up early for my exercises and now I won’t get enough sleep.’ Her right hand rose to her clavicles and she rubbed at her skin. ‘I’m too distressed.’
Each morning, from half past five precisely, rhythmic crashes and bumps came from behind Parr’s bedroom door. In the first week of term, several of us had gathered in the corridor worried that she was having some sort of fit and wondering whether it would be all right to barge in. The door had opened and Parr’s head popped out, red and boiled-looking, to tell us to clear off.
‘Your exercises wake us before the bell,’ I said now. ‘And we don’t complain that you seem intent on bringing the building down. Perhaps we ought to, since you are so enthusiastic about rules and regulations.’ I should not have said this, of course. I should have apologized for the noise and let her leave satisfied, but her criticism that I was somehow unfit for the hockey team was cruel.
‘What business is that of yours? When you’re working as a governess for some grim family you found in the Morning Star, you’ll wake up when you have to. I should think you’d want to prepare yourself for what’s to come. Goodnight. If you disturb me again, I’ll make a proper complaint.’
Parr left and slammed the door, being careful not to catch her nightgown. A framed photograph of Locke’s brother fell from the dresser and the glass shattered.
‘She’s insufferable.’ Locke took the coal brush from the fireplace and knelt to sweep up the glass. ‘She’ll never have to work in her life – or marry either – if she doesn’t want to. She’s an heiress, you know. I heard that she owns two houses in London and another in the countryside.’
‘And perhaps I’ll have to be a governess in the end, but I am going to fight it all I can.’
‘What’s that smell?’
Leonora jumped up and came to the fire.
The toast was burnt. I opened the window and waved the pieces around in the cold night until they stopped smoking. Then I dropped them into the bin. Locke cut more bread and put it on the forks.
‘If one has money, one can probably do anything.’ I pictured Parr sweeping through grand houses and gardens, in her nightgown and cap, with no one near but cowering servants.
‘She can’t vote, though.’
‘No, so then we’re all in the same boat after all.’
I knew nothing then of the tragedy in Parr’s life or how she had come to be so wealthy. Poor Cicely Parr. A tragic beginning and a nasty end. In between she met Locke and me, which may or may not have been compensation. But we were eighteen or nineteen years old and not able to be much better than we were.
‘Why should you care what she thinks?’
But I did care what Parr thought. I cared because she was the captain and, despite her strange manners and eccentric qualities, I looked up to her. It was what Father had taught me and what I had learned from all my reading about explorers and heroes. We must respect our leader, even in difficult times. I wanted her to think well of me but, of course, Locke was right and I should not care.
Chapter Six
The Nimrod had sailed from the East India Dock to Temple Pier for exhibition to the public. Admission was 2s 6d. I had the money in my hand before I reached the Embankment. It was a cool day in late October but the crowds were pink-faced and sticky-looking. A group of boys played at the river’s edge, trying to get a dog to jump over sticks and into the water, laughing and cheering as it splashed and panted. I became distracted watching them, tripped over a man’s foot and fell into a shoe-shine boy, sending him sprawling. The boy waved away my apology, set out his stall again with a stoical shrug. I fought through families, couples and groups of young men to reach the pier, wondered why so many had come to see what I wanted to believe was my own private interest, and then I stopped. The sky and river thickened and thinned as I stared. Sounds flattened until there was just the soft lapping of water.
The ship was as long and narrow as the pictures had suggested, striking with its black hull and high masts. It lay calmly in the water as though, after its turbulent voyage, it wanted sleep. I had heard that members of the expedition team might be here to explain things to visitors and I prayed that there might be the smallest possibility of meeting Shackleton.
When I stepped onto the ship, the spirits of the explorers were so thick in the air that, were the real men here, I would not have noticed them. I peered into the men’s sleeping quarters – they called them Oyster Alley – and the areas for the ponies and dogs and sledges, the food stores. Everything was just as the newspapers had described it and almost as I had imagined, but the ship was not thousands of miles away at the bottom of the world. It was here and my feet were touching the deck and its dust and air were going into my nostrils and down into my lungs. I reached to touch the wall. My hand rested on the wood as crowds shoved past. I shut my eyes to feel the place better.
We were out on the ocean, sailing across the Weddell Sea, icebergs hunched and sleeping. The men shuffled in and out of their quarters, up and down the ship, some silent, some muttering, one shouting to another. Water sloshed around my feet and sprayed my hair. Salt seared my cheeks and pricked my eyes. Ernest called out to me, asking for my help.
Farringdon, make sure that the ponies are all right.
Aye, Captain.
Aye, Captain?
What a fool. If I did not try to keep a grip on reality, I might lose my mind and slip into the wrong world, just as my father always did, and wind up talking to ghosts and sea spirits when I needed to concentrate on studying and learning.
I crossed the Embankment to the Medical Examination Hall to see the exhibition of stores and equipment. Photographs lined the walls, windows to a crumbly white world where coal-eyed men huddled to light pipes with mittened hands, where ice made an atlas of the sea, and the ship tilted, tall and black against the sky, as birds wailed above the masts. Around the room were stuffed seals, penguins, skua gulls, positioned as though ready to jump or to fly. A dummy explorer stood by the door of a weather-beaten tent all prepared to set out onto the ice. He was dressed in the clothes of a real expedition member. He looked as though there was warmth in him, as though he might open his mouth and exhale a white ball of breath. I wanted to touch him and I lifted my hand but didn’t dare reach out, lest I disturb or interrupt him. There were two sledges, one loaded and ready for its journey, and the smashed-up remains of another.
There were sleeping bags, finnesko boots, ski boots, oil lamps and cookers. There were scientific instruments: the theodolite, for surveying and taking observations for position; the aneroid barometer, for taking the altitude of mountains; the hypsometer, for ascertaining the altitude by the boiling point of water; and the thermometers which were carried on the sledge journeys. I catalogued each item in my notebook.
I saw a small printing machine and a copy of Aurora Australis, which the members of the party composed and printed. There were several cameras, a gramophone and a sewing machine. I examined every item carefully, then I returned to the figure at the tent and watched him for some time, as though I expected him to speak to me. What might he say? I tried to shut out the chat
ter so that there were just the explorer and me. How I would have liked to enter that room, at night, and stand alone with him.
‘Splendid to see the public so excited. We must celebrate this and encourage it.’
The voice was rounded and carried a sense of its own importance. I twisted around to see whose it was. My knees softened and I put my hand to my mouth, then snatched it away and tried to appear composed. It was Ernest Shackleton. He was as tall and handsome as he seemed in photographs and was addressing a group of men and women near the door. I must speak, I thought, and ask him about the expedition, real questions that others wouldn’t ask, about the feeling of boots on ice, of frozen hair, the smell of burning whale oil. Would he ever consider taking someone like me on his next expedition? There was too much in my head. If only these people would go away, I could think of my words. I moved closer until I was just behind him. He didn’t notice. It’s me! I wanted to say. Don’t we know each other so well by now? The crowd swelled and shoved around the door and this gave me my chance to do something I didn’t know I was going to do. A tan kid glove protruded from his pocket. I snapped it out and put it up my sleeve.
I committed the act of theft without much control, but I held the glove firmly in the crook of my elbow and walked away. Yes, it was shameful, but Shackleton was a polar explorer and must have plenty of gloves. I might knit a pair myself and send them to him, so that this one, this very glove that had warmed the flesh and muscles and bone of the great explorer’s hand, could stay with me.
I dawdled along the Embankment, turning sometimes for another glimpse of the Nimrod. I had three years at college in which to lay my plans. I would return to my room and work harder than ever, not only at my studies but at my research and preparations. Shackleton may have failed, again, to reach the Pole, but we were closer now and within the next few years someone would certainly make it. The glove would sit on my desk and keep me sure of my way.
When Nights Were Cold Page 5
