The Ice Lovers

by Jean McNeil

  At the hotel he finds the group sitting in the bar. Although his official intention is to go to bed, he decides at the last minute to take the only empty chair, next to the journalist – historian! He has her labelled as a journalist, and somehow he knows this will annoy her. Helen, that’s her name.

  ‘How are you getting your bearings?’ he asks.

  ‘I have no idea where I am,’ she says. Her smile is wide and unstable. ‘We’ve all been drinking since dinner. I’m shattered. I have no idea where I am. Oh, sorry, I’ve already said that. Where have you been all night then?’

  He tells her about the Government House reception.

  ‘It’s good to know Maggie’s memory is alive and well –’ she points to a portrait of the ex-prime minister, hanging triumphant on the hotel wall.

  David thinks, this woman will be Labour or Lib Dem, so he refrains from saying, actually I quite admire some of the things she did when in office. I think history will absolve her. Instead he talks about the Antarctic. ‘It’s completely insane, the appeal of the place. You’ll see. When you’re there, you miss home, the people you love. You think, get me out of here! As soon as you’re out you start scheming to get back. That’s all you want to do, all you can think: get me back to the Antarctic.’

  David so loves this chapter of the experience: unless you were flying in and stuck in the Falklands due to weather, the days before leaving for the Antarctic always harboured expectation, the pull of an enigma. Even if they would eventually pull up to a stark wharf ringed by green outbuildings situated among piles of loose shale, like a granite quarry, and they would all be shocked at the isolation, at the simplicity.

  She laughs, and he can see this delights her, too, this paradox and wonder. They are going to a place where there is nothing, and they are so excited, like children. Look at him, he has been to the Antarctic eight times now, and he still loves it.

  ‘Even here, in the Islands,’ she begins, ‘I can feel the pull of something, just over the horizon. It feels like we’re about to go to a colony, or another planet. I feel like I’m leaving the world.’

  ‘You are,’ he said. ‘Travelling to the Antarctic is like going nowhere else, except maybe outer space. It’s the last place in the world without money or cars. And home to no one. It’s nobody’s country.’

  ‘Do you think about the Antarctic,’ she asks, ‘when you are home?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. Then, ‘ No.’ He pauses. ‘I mean, yes and no.’

  She laughs and again he sees her wide, spontaneous laugh, how alive to the contradictions of life she is. And also something else… she has been set free, although he is not sure from what. Not from drinks parties, official duties, the burden of serving Her Majesty’s Government. No, her release is more mysterious.

  ‘Yes,’ he clarifies, once and for all. ‘I think about the Antarctic all the time. I miss it, even when I’m there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think it’s because I’m always aware of leaving. That it will soon be time to leave, or other people are leaving, or that no one can ever stay there. The Antarctic forces you to live for the moment. You want to stay there forever, and you know you can’t, and are simultaneously relieved that you will eventually have to go.’

  He finds she is staring at him with a sobered expression.

  ‘But don’t quote me on any of this,’ he smiles.

  ‘Don’t worry. I probably won’t quote you on anything.’

  He looks at her, momentarily shocked, then sees she is joking. ‘Good,’ he says, and laughs. ‘I’d be really put out if you didn’t quote me on something.’

  Their group roars with ragged, disapproving laugher, some shared and ribald joke that David and Helen have missed due to their private conversation, and they all order another round.

  He stays up far too late and drinks far too much. On his way to bed that night, climbing the uncertain stairs up to the second floor and no longer in Helen’s company, David has a familiar feeling; it is very like what he feels for the Antarctic when he is away from it, or has been prevented from returning to it – an indefinite, treacherous growl of separation.

  The next morning Helen walked out into a bleached, punishing sun. She had been warned to wear sunscreen in the Islands, no matter the weather. The ozone ‘hole’ may have partially knit itself together, but ozone cover was still very thin in the Southern Ocean.

  She had read that the Islands lay at the same latitude south as London occupied north, more or less, 51.15 degrees, but the light was entirely different. There was a harried, beacon quality to it, as if it were eager to move on once it had identified what lived under its spotlight. The light did not disperse itself through the sky, but fell in shards, like glass or metal. Then there was the wind, which arrived in bucking sheets from the west. The weather changed several times a day – sun, cloud, hail, sleet, then sun again, within hours. But always there was the wind. It never seemed to calm.

  David was walking down the road on the other side in the other direction. She watched as he crossed the road, first looking out for hurtling Land Rovers.

  ‘Did you hear about the ship?’

  ‘Yes, I saw.’ A scrawled piece of paper had gone up on the hotel notice board that morning to say that their ship would be three days late coming into port.

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and straightened. A blast of wind hit him in the back, and he lurched toward her, stopping just shy of her body. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not unusual, but it means we’ll be late getting away. There’s a lot of cargo to be loaded I hear.’

  ‘I’m actually relieved,’ she said. ‘I wanted to spend a few more days here.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘A few more days to get blown down by the wind and shop for stuffed penguins?’

  ‘I sort of like it here.’ She threw her gaze out to Ross Road, taking in the brightly painted houses and picket fences, the Araucaria trees, the gift shops that catered to cruise ship tourists which lined the harbour. ‘It’s surreal, flying all this way only to end up in the UK.’

  ‘But it’s not the UK at all. It just looks like it is; actually the Islands are becoming more and more South American.’

  ‘Do you come here often?’

  ‘Once a year, usually. Some years delegates come from the Islands and we meet in London. I always feel relieved not to have to come all the way here – carbon guilt and all that – but I find that if I miss a year, I miss the Islands. It’s strange.’ He frowned, obscurely. ‘So, are you going to the Curry Night tonight?’ The hotel’s weekly menu stated that Wednesday was curry night, Thursday pizza night, Fridays was an asado – a barbecue. ‘I guess that’s the one Argentine word the islanders let pass,’ Helen said.

  ‘No, there’s quite a few, actually,’ David said, with enthusiasm. ‘All the words for horses’ tack, and for sheep-shearing, are from Patagonia. They call each other “Che”, too, which is as Argentine as you get. Although you have to be a real Falkland Islander, born and bred, to earn the right to be called that.’

  There was the faintest tinge of politeness in Helen’s expression. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I have a tendency to lecture.’

  ‘That’s all right. I have a lot to learn.’

  They went their separate ways, then, Helen into the wind, and David down the street, blown along by ragged gusts.

  The following day the wind dropped; in the summer, Helen had been told, windless days in the Falklands were rare. On David’s suggestion they went for a walk to Gypsy Cove – he usually did this walk when he had what he called ‘downtime’ in the Islands.

  They set out along a footpath which skirted the harbour and FIPASS, the floating dock facility where they would board their ship in two days’ time. A fisheries patrol vessel was moored next to the Resolute.

  ‘That’s where I’ll be tonight,’ David said, pointing at the destroyer. ‘Officially, it’s a drinks party. But I have to sneak away and discuss something with the commander.’

  ‘Someth
ing,’ she smiled. ‘I see.’

  ‘Well, you’re a journalist, aren’t you? I can’t exactly spill the beans.’

  ‘I used to be a journalist. I’m more of an historian, now.’

  ‘But you’re writing about something that happened four years ago. That’s journalism, not history.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any rule about how much time has to pass before something is considered history.’

  They walked on, picking their way through the dense scrub of the shoreline. Clumps of spiny moss, like shrunken shrubs, threatened to trip her up. ‘That’s Diddle-dee,’ David said. ‘It’s actually a shrub, although it’s so small you’d never think it. There’s an amazing biodiversity on the Islands, considering how barren they are. There’s even a native strawberry. You’d never think anything so delicate would survive here.’

  ‘You know a lot about the Islands.’

  ‘I’ve picked up a few things over the years. Interminable UK Overseas Territories Conservation conferences, that sort of thing.’

  She had the impression that the rueful tone was somehow for her benefit, and that David actually enjoyed these conferences. She might think him a jobsworth civil servant, someone towing Her Majesty’s line – sherry parties, House of Commons lunches. And he might be right, she might have made these judgements, had they been anywhere other than in the suspended animation of the Falkland Islands, walking together past rusting hulks of abandoned ships to look at penguins.

  ‘Why don’t they get rid of these things? That’s the fourth wreck I’ve seen in the harbour.’

  ‘There are ten in all, maybe eleven. They’re part of the history of the place. Who would do it, anyway? They’ve got no value as salvage.’ This might be the voice David used in meetings – impatient, clipped, enamoured of the facts. ‘So what is it that interests you about the sea-ice incident?’

  She had been waiting for this question. That it came now, between gusts of wind as they walked up the powdery track to Gypsy Cove, was merely a matter of timing. He’d been wanting to ask it, she had sensed, since they had met.

  ‘I met someone who knew her, a friend of hers. She showed me some of the emails she sent from base that winter. And –’ here she paused as a sheet of wind tore the words from her mouth. ‘I was intrigued. She wrote very beautifully –’

  ‘ About what?’

  ‘About being in the Antarctic, about what she was feeling, what she was experiencing.’

  ‘There were rumours that she lost it, basically.’

  She ground to a halt. ‘You mean, lost composure?’

  ‘I mean lost sanity. But I didn’t want to say that.’

  ‘I don’t think she was insane at all.’

  He studied her. She could imagine him thinking, I’ve hit a nerve, there. Or perhaps, that’s what women always say, defending insanity out of some suite of emotional hurts.

  ‘Most people think it was suicide.’

  She had heard this, too. Beside her, he was waiting for her reaction – how she would weigh in on the issue.

  ‘I don’t know. I never write my story before I write my story.’

  ‘The Antarctic can be a very bad experience, or it can be very, very good,’ David observed. ‘It’s hardly ever anything between.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ she said.

  ‘You know, I didn’t ask to be your chaperone. I don’t work for the PR department. I work for the Foreign Office.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for a chaperone. The only reason I have one is that you have something to hide.’

  ‘I have something to hide?’

  ‘Not you personally. But, I mean –’ here she flung her hands down in frustration. ‘Someone died here. Did you really think there would be no interest in this? That no one would care?’

  ‘We let you come down, didn’t we? If there were anything to hide, that wouldn’t have happened. Why are you interested in it? Is it some indirect vengeance of yours?’

  He was smarter than she thought, this man. She did not answer, or tell him the reason for her interest, because she did not know herself. For the first time in her adult life, she had decided to allow a mystery to overtake her. She could not explain her motivations.

  Depending on how well she got to know this man standing beside her now, dressed in a blue windbreaker and a boyish knit hat, she might tell him why, as far as she understood it. She might tell him everything. Nothing about him invited her confidences; perhaps that was why she wanted to give them to him.

  David was walking ahead of her now, making his way down to the beach, threading through the Danger! Land Mines! signs. She hadn’t seen these since Afghanistan, ten years ago. Although the mines lining the Falklands shores were much older. They had been left deliberately, as a live memorial to the war. Occasionally sheep wandered into a minefield and were blown up.

  Ahead of her on the path down to the beach, David turned. His body had a ‘aren’t you coming?’ inflection. He was stiff, she decided, it was there in the way he walked – a tall, upright man, a militaristic bearing, but also somehow the posture of someone who had missed his calling. This was a subtle, vaporous impression, but it was there.

  ‘The clouds –’ she pointed to where grey clouds spiralled in the distant sky, like a tornado.

  ‘Oh, we’ll get a bit wet. Don’t worry.’

  ‘As long as we don’t get blown up.’

  ‘That I can’t promise.’

  She followed David down the path to the beach. As she descended, she noticed little hillocks on either side of the path, framed by an aperture, perfectly round. These were the burrows of Magellanic penguins. The penguins themselves had gone for a swim. She watched as they emerged one by one or in pairs from the sea, shaking themselves dry at the edge of the breakers. Magellanics were small, dinner suited creatures. The penguins waddled up the beach and right past them, as if the two humans did not exist at all.

  2

  It was late afternoon when Luke left Bluefields. His co-pilot, the nervous field assistant, was so exhausted from their days of shifting fuel drums that he’d fallen asleep on takeoff.

  In any case, whether Andy/Mark was awake or not, he was flying alone. Not that the younger man didn’t talk, rather Luke was struck by how little this new generation listened, a deficiency he was convinced was linked to their inability to live in the moment, preferring to take photographs out the window before turning the camera on themselves to take a self-portrait, already basking in their audience’s amazement. They were too busy recording the moment to live it.

  Nara had been different. She was quiet, thoughtful. She had listened to his stories of the years he spent flying in Alaska, the Yukon, the landscape made ragged through successive waves of grandeur, glaciers, the rigid permafrost, hurtling seasons of melt. He had seen some wondrous things beneath him, he had told her: the mighty Mackenzie River, snaking all the way up to the rim of the continent, herds of caribou gathering and dispersing across the tundra like clouds, floating ice sheets fermenting with heat, nudged by Russian and Canadian icebreakers. Blankets of wildflowers; from the air, they throbbed, dark, lurid mauves, pulsating in waves of undulating colours, or sharp dandelion yellows.

  After those years of adventures, he had gotten married and taken a job down South. If he had ever been Canadian, he had discarded that identity years ago, shuttling as he did between South Africa, his wife’s country, the UK, and the Antarctic. A British passport had bought him a spell in the Army, when he had been deployed to Kuwait in the first Gulf War.

  After he left the forces there was a stint as a commercial pilot flying 737s out of Edinburgh and Glasgow. He truly felt like a bus driver then; the job had been less about flying – the planes did it all for you these days anyway – and more about signing off manifests, calculating fuel payloads, paying his union dues and licences, cardiograms, eyesight tests, programming the airliner to pick itself up and put itself down, flying with a co-pilot whose name he often did not know and promptly forgot, to his emba
rassment, to Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen; this was his route, the dark channel of the North Sea, studded with increasinlgy twitchy oil rigs, siphoning the last of the North Sea oil from the seabed floor.

  To all this, Nara had listened. He had felt the force of this young woman focussing on his life, and was flattered. Had he been so mistaken to think that listening of that calibre and intensity might itself be a kind of love?

  That summer on the ferry flight to Canada he wrote to her all the way; every time they put the plane down he raced to find a computer, such had been his feeling of separation. She was down there – that was how he saw her, beneath him, underneath all of them, holding up the planet with her thin, girlish shoulders – trapped behind a wall called winter. Even while he was fending off mosquitoes and having ungainly conversations with his children about how school was going, as he refreshed his flying skills in a simulator at the aircraft manufacturer’s headquarters, the sun blaring outside, bears lumbering through the forest, berries thickening, he would think of her in that barren place, the sky lacquered with cold stars, the steel dusk, and feel afraid for her.

  For the first time in a long time, since his children were small, perhaps, he was afraid on behalf of someone else, afraid that he might never see her again, that some accident, some unforeseen occurrence (his licence not being renewed because of a bad result on his ECG, you never knew) would prevent him from returning to her. And he had felt another apprehension, far more difficult to define: that she would suffer in a way not of her own making, in a way she would not be able to escape from.

  The black strip of the runway was in his sights now. He retracted the skis. It was near midnight but the sun glared, silver-orange, his constant beacon. How sweet it was, that he never saw winter, only migrated from the steepest curve of the northern hemisphere summer to the southern equivalent every season. What was that word? Heliotropic. It meant an animal or a flower that follows the sun. He was tuned to the earth’s magnetic field to guide him up and down the planet, and like an Arctic tern he barely saw darkness. He had become, without meaning to, a creature of the light.