The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  THE

  ICE LOVERS

  THE

  ICE LOVERS

  Jean McNeil

  McArthur & Company

  Toronto

  First published in Canada in 2009 by

  McArthur & Company

  322 King Street West, Suite 402

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5V 1J2

  www.mcarthur-co.com

  Copyright © 2009 Jean McNeil

  All rights reserved.

  The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in

  any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed

  written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McNeil, Jean, 1968-

  The ice lovers / Jean McNeil.

  ISBN 978-1-55278-884-4

  I. Title.

  PS8575.N433I24 2010 C813’.54 C2010-903988-2

  eISBN 978-1-77087-115-1

  The publisher would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for our publishing activities. The publisher further wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council and the OMDC for our publishing program.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arts Council of England in the writing of this book.

  Design and composition by Tania Craan

  Cover photographs: landscape © Cliff Leight/Getty Images; glacier © Veer

  Author photograph by Diego Ferrari

  Text images: photo © Jean McNeil; map © British Antarctic Survey

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Bluefields

  PART I :The Crystal River

  1

  2

  3

  PART II: Land of Ice and Fire

  1

  2

  3

  4

  PART III: Running Out of Night

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART IV :The Known World

  1

  2

  PART V: Wintering

  1

  2

  3

  PART VI: Glimmer

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART VII: Vanishing Point

  1

  2

  3

  4

  PART VIII: Iceblink

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Fennoscandia

  Short Glossary of Antarctic Terms

  Questions for Discussion

  Acknowledgements

  The research for this novel was facilitated by a residency in the Antarctic, supported by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Arts Council of England’s (ACE) International Fellowships programme. During the three and a half months I spent in the Antarctic in the austral summer of 2005–6 the fellowship allowed me access to BAS’ Antarctic scientific programme, its personnel, ships, planes and remote field camps.

  I remain deeply grateful to both BAS and the ACE for this unusual and life-changing experience, and for their programme, which has given many writers and artists access to a continent usually off-limits to all but scientists and officials. In particular I would like to thank David Walton and John Shears at BAS, John Hampson and Charles Beckett at the Arts Council of England’s National and London offices respectively, and Natasha Messenger and Tim Eastop, formerly of the International Fellowships programme at the ACE. Thanks are also due to the Arts Council of England’s Grants to Individuals fund for a follow-up grant to support the writing of this book.

  I would also like to thank the Royal Literary Fund and Newnham College, Cambridge University, for their support. My fellowship at the University of Cambridge allowed me time and peace of mind during the final stages of working on The Ice Lovers. The Scott Polar Research Institute and the British Library were very helpful with research, as were the many scientists and Antarctic workers who shared their knowledge and experience of life South. Special thanks are due to Layla Curtis and Diego Ferrari for friendship during the research and writing of this book, to Kim McArthur for her unflagging support, to Francine Brody for her helpful editing, and to Maggie McKernan for her good counsel.

  A note on place-names: Thanks to the Mapping and Geographic Information Centre at the British Antarctic Survey, who kindly produced the map of Antarctica in the front matter of this book. Those who know the Antarctic well, on reading this novel, may suspect me of spatial confusion with regard to some place-names. While set in the Antarctic, this book is a piece of imaginative literature. The novel refers to actual geographical place-names in the Antarctic (some of which are shown on the map), but also makes reference to places which either do not exist or are extant, but correspond to different geographical features than the ones indicated in the novel. Names for all ships and scientific bases, certain official bodies (such as The Polar Research Council) are fictional, as are all the characters in this novel.

  The extracts that appear in this novel are credited as follows:

  From South: The Endurance Expedition by Ernest Shackleton, originally published by William Heinemann, 1919, reprinted by Penguin Books (UK), © 2002. ‘The Winter Night’ by Fridtjof Nansen, reprinted in The Arctic by Elizabeth Kolbert (ed), published by Granta books, © 2007.

  THE

  ICE LOVERS

  Bluefields

  The ice shelf looms in the windscreen. Behind him, seasmoke is rolling in. He loves its ermine swirl, even if it impedes his visibility. He fixes his approach. It is one of those albino days, the light bleached into a pigmentless colour; not white nor silver, but some new hue projected by the giant skeletal thrust of the ice sheet.

  Underneath the plane the ice in the Weddell Sea is finally breaking up; from the air it looks like muslin – the thin, lacy frazil ice, ice flowers sprouting on the perimeter of meltwater.

  It is an absolutely dingle day in December 2016. This is his favourite moment in the Antarctic calendar, early in the brief summer, watching the ice loosen its grip on the continent.

  The sun is out so the contrast is good, he can see the sastrugi and the fractures drawn on the surface by crevasses. He will get it down on the deck without a bump. He has been doing this for twelve seasons now. As a pilot, he subsists on a volatile diet of experience and luck; these days it’s the latter that preoccupies him, he goes over and over the chances he has taken and which so nearly went wrong: flying through too-narrow cols, brushing nunataks so that a geologist returning from the field can get some good photos of the strata. Once or twice in a season he has these ‘moments’ as he calls them; dips into air pockets, can’t get the power he needs to climb, the stern grey face of the mountains loom in the windscreen and seem out to teach him a lesson. He likes to take risks, of course, he would be bored otherwise. He is counting on luck. But he has been doing this for so long now and he has a theory about luck: it runs out. Eventually.

  His co-pilot is a nervy field assistant (what is his name? They are all called Andy or Mark; he’s not particularly good at names, and keeps these two in reserve as guesses). Nervy Andy/Mark relaxes his shoulders. Little does he suspect how much worse it could have been, no vis, poor contrast, him deciding to land anyway on nerves, on instinct. Only inches above the deck thinking, now, now, now – he can feel it coming, sometimes, the land, he can feel it reaching up to grasp him.

  He and the field assistant will spend two or three days flying aviation fuel from the ship further inland, r
eplenishing stocks for the coming summer field season. The ship has just been in to relieve Midas IV, the new ice sheet station nearly five hundred miles to the east. He will fly there too, eventually, drop off the field assistant and take a shower, his first in a week. He will sit on the platform station, which hums all night with the vibration of the generator, watching the sun hover above the icefield. This time of year it never sets, only skirts the horizon, tantalizing it with the possibility of night.

  First he has to blank down the aircraft. He clambers up onto the wings, releases the guy wires, and climbs down. It is just like tying a tent to the ground – he kicks the ice screws in, ties off the tension cord. The plane secured, he surveys the landscape: a white plain, unfiltered blue sky occupying equal vectors of his vision, the horizon smudged with seasmoke to the north, and feels a slight constriction in his heart. The emptiness fails to captivate him as it once did. Now he sees it as vortical and scrawny; immense, yes, awesome in its simplicity, but it does not grip and impassion him with that strange vacant frenzy, as it did in the beginning.

  The diminishing of his enchantment had begun just before he met Nara, and he wondered now if this was not an accident; it had something to do with her, as if he had been waiting for someone to pass on the baton to. He never told her, but when they went to Berkner nearly four years ago, he had stood on the ice sheet with her and for the first time had seen the Antarctic for what it was, despite the tungsten light, the tangerine sunsets: a cold place.

  Four years ago on their way to Berkner, he and Nara had taken off from this very white plain, blue-less and field-less, although the precise piece of ice they had used as a runway had long been dissolved into the sea. These days, parts of the Ronne Ice Shelf were only lightly soldered to the continent.

  They had stood here together, four years before, unaware of what awaited them within hours, scouring the snowfields – fields of such deep, pulsating blankness they passed through an invisible colour barrier to become indigo, turquoise.

  Since that day he had avoided coming here, he even avoided the name. Like so many places in the Antarctic, Bluefields was not even a place, just a fuel depot that moved with the shifting ice, marked by a line of bamboo flags. That the Antarctic had few place-names was one consequence of having the thinnest of histories. There were the Dead Men places: Charcot, Latady, Ross, d’Urville; the names derived from explorer mishap: Hope Bay, Cape Disappointment, Deception Island, and (his favourite) Exasperation Inlet; then the made-up names: Site 8, Base K, RABID camp – the kind of names they’d used when he was in the military, itinerant designations made to be folded into boxes when they’d outlived their purpose.

  What had they talked about, that day? He could remember Nara telling him about the German artist whose name he could not remember. The artist had been a pilot in the Second World War. He’d been shot down in winter and saved by local people, who had transported him to the nearest village. What had saved him was their dual remedy against burns and cold: he’d been covered in lard and felt. For the rest of his life, Nara had told him, the artist had been obsessed by these two substances. Once he had covered himself in them and locked himself in a room full of wolves.

  Together they had stared into the horizon, absorbed its barking, infinite light. The convection heat rays of the sun beat down with such intensity the snowfield wavered, as in a desert – which is precisely what this place is: the highest, coldest, driest desert on earth. In tandem they had dragged their hypnotised gaze away from the white plain, blinking into each other’s eyes. Nara’s were blue, he remembered – an uncommon dark blue, indigo or navy. Her black hair cut short, a small woman with a certain way of moving, something in her gait reminded him of a man. She was steely, she had absorbed many spiked tasks. Not unfeminine, but a dark horse. It was the Antarctic summer of 2012. In their minds they still called each other friend.

  Now he will have to think of all this again, he will have to remember. Because back on base the ship is due in, with its cargo of new recruits for the Antarctic summer. This year the ship is carrying a journalist – or was it an historian? He can’t remember the base commander’s exact term, because what the base commander said next overtook his mind completely. The journalist was writing about the sea-ice incident. She’ll want to talk to you, I suppose, the base commander said.

  The plane blanked down, he and the field assistant walk toward the edge of the shelf, Mark/Andy probing for crevasses all the way. The ship sits fifty feet below them moored under the sheer cliffs, the crew on the lookout for ice falls. They will crane up the Wor Geordie, as the basket for moving people on and off is called, and he and the field assistant will clamber in. The plane will spend the night on the ice shelf above them, tied down so that the katabatic winds do not flip it over.

  On the ship he will be too hot, too comfortable. He would rather be bunked down in the back of the Otter – how he usually sleeps when he’s out in deep field. He will be exhausted, but sleep will refuse to congeal inside him. Now that summer has arrived and there is twenty-four-hour daylight, he has trouble sleeping. That night he will lie awake in his bunk listening to the groaning of the ship as the swells nudge it against the ice shelf. He will think, is it possible to extinguish memories? That’s the right word. They are fire. They are burning all the time.

  On the ship he sits down on his cabin bunk, and drops his head into his hands. He is so tired, but also very, very awake. Lately he has been struggling with a feeling he calls ‘unrealness’ – even in waking life, it’s as if he is in a dream of his own making, but cannot remember what the dream is supposed to be about, he cannot remember what he is supposed to do next. These days are like sea-smoke, he waits for them to be dissolved under the full albedo of the summer sun.

  He hears the dank metal grind of the ship as it scrapes against the ice. No, this is definitely not a dream. It is just the beginning of another Antarctic season, ferrying fuel drums back and forth.

  Somewhere around three in the morning, the floodlit daylight of midsummer streaming through his cabin window, he falls asleep.

  PART I

  The Crystal River

  1

  Before I came to the Antarctic I met a woman who told me the future is like a crystal river. She said that in all our futures some things are already decided. These events can be seen in advance, because they have already formed in the same way that crystals congeal, binding themselves to each other molecularly. It was these shapes the cards were reading; around them, the river kept flowing in narrow currents, eddies, outflows. This was the river of life. Here, some things were up for grabs, they had not yet been decided. Here, things could go either way.

  That the future could be read at all astonished me. If you could read the future, then it meant someone or something wanted it, was willing it, to be so. I asked her what this something was and she said she didn’t know. You must have some idea, I said, after all you make your living looking into this realm. She said she was not sure, and in any case she did not think there was an answer, or that the answer would be comprehensible to any of us, were we to know it.

  I went to see her on an early winter afternoon: pale, worn skies. Windblown scraps of humanity in parkas, scarves, blown through the dank spidery avenues of Holland Park. Arriving on the doorstep of a smart terraced house, I nearly turned around and left, and perhaps it would have been better if I had.

  The woman was elfin, almost necessarily androgynous. Her toenails were huge and ingrown (she did readings with her shoes off, so she could feel more connected to the earth). Her flat was crammed with amulets and statues. Isis, for example, stood sentinel by the window. Chunks of quartz and crystals studded every surface. There was one anomaly in this gypsy fairground picture – the woman’s diction was that particular upper-class timbre, like a handful of diamonds falling on a glass table.

  ‘But don’t you wonder?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you want to understand?’

  She gave me a blank look in return. I said that I beli
eved everything was understandable. I said I believed in the human mind, but I did not believe in a will outside of human minds.

  ‘Why come here, then,’ she asked, ‘if you don’t believe?’

  ‘Because I feel as if I’m dying.’

  ‘And you want me to show you that isn’t true.’

  ‘I’m sick of the uncertainty. I just want to know what

  ‘I’m sick of the uncertainty. I just want to know what will happen.’ I could have said, and to hell with it.

  She showed me, then, what would happen. Or, as she put it, what was wanting to happen. I said, who wants this to happen? Who is this wanter? Someone else, it seemed, had designs for my existence.

  That was when she told me that some things are written down already, and in the same way that the shapes in the crystal river have already cohered, these lines of text had also been decided upon.

  ‘I am not a child,’ I said. ‘I will not have my future dictated to me by some outside force.’

  ‘Your future is inside you. It has already happened. You know it, on some level, you know exactly what will happen, and you are only dreaming it into existence, and the cards are reading the dreams.’

  ‘You mean I wanted my husband to die? That’s why it happened.’

  ‘Not consciously.’

  The woman said I see lots of travel, and she showed me the card with two ravens. One looked straight at me with a single gleaming coal eye, the other had its head turned away, toward an unseen horizon. She told me that these two birds belonged to Odin; their names are Huginn, which means Thought, and Muninn, or Memory. Every day Thought and Memory fly around the world and report to Odin all they have seen. I thought, even the albatross, with its epic flights, cannot manage that. ‘Nothing that is of any value is untouched by the eyes of these two birds,’ she said. Together they had been to the Antarctic many times.