Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  He leaned back on the couch and shut his eyes. He might have dozed for a bit, but not for long. When he opened his eyes again a strand of her hair, still a bit wet from the shower, had escaped from behind her left ear. Her nape, which was pretty much all that he could see of her, showed two long wedges of fine dark hair. He had a shockingly clear recollection of the the feel of her neck, those soft hairs under his fingers.

  Why was she still here? Not for his sake of course. He could see how she felt about him, about last night, from the way she hid her nose in his brother’s weird papers. He told himself that he’d expected nothing more. He had offered to let her stay for her sake, not for his. It was obvious that he would sleep on the couch.

  Maybe I should ask her if there’s anything in that book about her magic granddad. But he didn’t want to mock her. Part of him really did want her to stay.

  He watched her read for a while longer then he got up and went to the window. She stirred when he moved but did not turn around.

  The hospital looked like a cruise ship on a sea of dirty ice. It hadn’t snowed any more in the night. The sky was clear and pale as shoal water. Out on the highway cars came and went, occluded by their own headlights. Were the passes open yet or was that local traffic?

  ‘Do you want to drive out to the airport? To see if there are any flights today? Or if the highway is open?’

  She didn’t seem to hear him so he said it again. Dragging her eyes from the book, she stared at him for several moments before she replied. ‘What?’

  ‘I said, we could go to the airport to see if it’s open.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He saw her glance at the desk again. ‘I looked that up on the internet. It’s still closed. So is the highway.’

  ‘Well, how about just going into town for a drive? I feel kind of cooped up.’

  ‘Of course. Go ahead.’

  He hadn’t expected that. ‘You don’t want to come? What will you do here?’

  ‘I suppose I’ll just read a bit more. Some of this stuff is quite interesting.’

  He went over to the door, put on Bert’s old coat. He could, he supposed, buy some more smokes. He could also use a little time by himself.

  She had already opened the book again, was lost in its pages. He felt a sudden stab of anger.

  ‘That book must be pretty good. What’s in it?’

  He saw, with some satisfaction, how painful it was for her to return to the room. ‘This book . . . ? It’s just two short biographies of British explorers. They went to Antarctica on different expeditions. They didn’t even know each other. One was called Alister Mackay. The other one was Cecil Meares.’

  ‘Meares? There’s a folder with that name on it. I was looking at it yesterday. Didn’t make a lot of sense.’

  She turned a page without looking up. ‘Really . . . ?’

  ‘You sure you don’t want to come for a ride around town? Get some fresh air and some lunch?’

  ‘I’m fine for now, thanks.’

  So that’s it, he thought. She says I can go now. She’s the type who reads, I’m the type who eats. He walked over to the desk and grabbed a random folder. ‘I’ll take this with me. It’s good to have something to read when you eat.’

  ‘Okay.’ She still didn’t turn around.

  Halfway down the corridor he realized that he’d left the keys to the apartment on the table inside the door. He stopped, was about to go back and get them. Perhaps she’ll have gone out by the time I come back. But he didn’t want to have to knock on the door and get her to open it, not right then, before he’d had a chance to have a smoke and a drive. He was afraid of what he might say.

  Fay heard his footsteps slow when he was halfway down the hall. They stopped. She put down the book she was reading and waited. He stood there for a few seconds and then went on down the corridor.

  Please, she thought. It’s not my fault. But I haven’t got time to be nice to you. This chance, the chance to find out who Hugh Morgan was, might never come again.

  She had lied about the airport and the highway being closed. Or at least, half lied: she had made a point of not checking the internet that morning. If they had reopened she didn’t want to know.

  She sifted through the unread papers until she found the file marked ‘Cecil Meares’. Then she made herself more coffee and began to read.

  When she closed the file again most of her coffee was still in the mug, only now it was cold. Her head swam.

  The Meares folder contained only one document – a short story perhaps, or maybe a fragment of a novel, or a memoir. It bore the name of the writer Jack London who, she knew from her own general knowledge, had written a lot of stuff about dogs and the Arctic. But there was no mention of any such memoir or novel by Jack London in the bibliographies she’d found on the net. Was it fake? Or was it real but unpublished? . . . Unlike much of the material in Bert Nilsson’s collection, this document wasn’t handwritten. It was a copy of a typescript. Maybe Bert had taken a chance on having this one photocopied. Maybe because it was too long to write out by hand. Or perhaps because it looked pretty harmless: how could a literary work be a secret?

  The answer, she guessed, must lie in the identity of the patient, the unnamed man in the hospital bed at whom the story was addressed. She knew from the book that the explorer Cecil Meares had, like the man in the bed, been some kind of presence at the Russo-Japanese war of 1904. He’d been arrested by both sides and treated as a spy . . . That might explain why Bert had put this story in a file with Meares’s name on it.

  What linked this British explorer to a beaten-down Irish sea captain, to an idealistic young Frenchman, to her elusive grandfather and his revenant clock? Or to that old Inuit hunter, Eskimo Joe, whose weird statement she had read that morning?

  All of them were lost. They disappeared in the ice. No one saw what became of them.

  Was that it?

  But Meares had died in bed of cirrhosis of the liver. It said so in that book. There was no mystery about his death. It was his life that was largely a blank space.

  She picked up the next folder. She’d been looking forward to getting to this one since she’d read the last line of the ‘Eskimo Joe’ file.

  ‘Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen: from Room 38’.

  She already knew quite a bit about this man. In 1912, Amundsen had won the race to the south pole. He’d beaten Scott’s British expedition, which included Cecil Meares and the famous Captain Oates, another man who had walked off alone into the snow.

  Bert’s papers included a note to Cecil Meares that was supposedly copied from Oates’s diary. She read it again now, then tried to check it on the internet. According to the web, Oates’s diary had been found in the tent with the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers. It was then passed unread to his mother. Years later, when a would-be biographer asked to see it, Mrs Caroline Oates, a devout and austere upper-class widow, denied that the diary had ever existed. But Bert had somehow found a piece of that diary, referring to a gun and a chronometer and a Room 38.

  She had a vision of clockwork, of wheels within wheels, the hint of bigger wheels lurking behind them. She could see how a few of them fitted together but she didn’t know how they were meant to turn. The spring was still hidden from her in the source of Bert’s secret papers, the place or thing known as ‘Room 38’. And she still had no idea where or what that might be.

  Cape Chelyuskin, Siberia, 1919

  Just before Amundsen left London he was called to an interview with Admiral William Sims, commander of US naval forces in Europe. They met not at Sims’s office, where Amundsen’s ­presence would surely be noted, but the admiral’s rooms at the Carlton Hotel: a world-famous explorer would be quite unremarkable there.

  Amundsen couldn’t think why Sims wanted to see him. It was July of 1918 and the Germans were again advancing on Paris across the line of the Marne, ju
st as they had done four years before. Scores of U-boats roamed the oceans, attacking ships of all nations. The war was in a very fine balance: surely an admiral had better things to do.

  Meares was waiting in the bar of the Carlton when Amundsen came down again. He wore the blue tunic of the new Royal Air Force; it was the third uniform that Amundsen had seen him in since 1914. Two pink gins sat on the counter.

  ‘I’ve brought you those instruments you wanted to borrow,’ Meares told him. ‘For a man who says he doesn’t believe in luck you’re very fond of your charms . . . Anyway. What did Sims want you for?’

  ‘He wanted to tell me that there shouldn’t be any submarines in the Barents Sea when the Maud is passing through. He says the U-boats assigned to the Arctic station are all sunk or out of service or else en route to Heligoland to refuel and rearm.’

  ‘I was going to tell you that – he got it from our code-breakers in Room 40 at the Admiralty. That’s just second-hand gossip. What does he want in return?’

  ‘He wants to know about the ice conditions in the Barents Sea and the Kara Sea, and reports on the weather. He wants any information I can give on the political situation at any Russian ports we visit – whether they’re held by the Reds or the Whites, if there’s food for soldiers or coal for ships or forage for horses. He wants to know about dock facilities, local sympathies, all that sort of thing. I’d guess that they’re going to send troops to fight the Bolsheviks.’

  ‘They are. As if we didn’t have enough wars already . . . He’s asking a lot in return for so little. How does he expect you to send all this stuff?’

  ‘By wireless. There’s a set aboard the Maud.’

  Meares put his drink down. ‘Sims wants you to send secret information by wireless? From up there?’

  ‘He’s given me a code book. He says it’s unbreakable. But it only works one way. I can only use it to send, not receive.’

  ‘And have you agreed?’

  ‘I couldn’t think of a way to say no. The Americans have been helping to fund my expedition on the quiet. Now I know why.’

  Meares finished his gin, signalled for two more. ‘You take my advice and have nothing to do with it. The Maud is a neutral Norwegian ship on a scientific voyage to the north pole. The U-boats won’t respect that but everyone else will. Even the Reds. But you’ll be boarded and searched every time you make port. if you’re caught with code books, or maybe even just a transmitter, you’ll be in big trouble. A ship and its crew could just disappear on that coast. I know. I’ve been there.’

  ‘So what should I do? I can’t afford to snub Sims.’

  Meares took out a cigarette, considering the problem. ‘Here’s what you do. You wait until the Maud is a day or so out of Norway. Then you disable your transmitter – I’ll have someone show you how to make it look like an accident. After that you don’t need the code books any more. So you put them in a sack with a couple of bits of ballast and chuck them into the sea. Just don’t let the others see you doing it.’

  ‘Without a wireless I can’t do anything for Sims. Or you for that matter.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’ Meares took a page out of his pocket and showed it to Amundsen. ‘There’s a White Russian wireless station still in operation at Khabarovo, on the Yugorsky Strait. Further on, there’s another wireless station on Dickson Island. And if you get anywhere near the Bering Strait, you can send messages through a friend of ours who trades in furs at the East Cape. His name is Clarendon Carpendale – an Australian chap I met in South Africa. He can send messages through the telegraph at Nome in Alaska.’ Meares tapped the paper he’d put on the counter. ‘One of these innocent phrases – “happy birthday”, “hope you are well” and so on – dropped into an ordinary telegram, would speak volumes to me. You just have to memorize them and what they refer to.’ He pulled a droll face. ‘And of course I’ll be sure to keep Sims informed of your progress.’

  Amundsen frowned at the page but didn’t pick it up. He wouldn’t be able to read it anyway: he’d needed glasses since his boyhood but was too vain to let anyone know. For this childish conceit, he thought, I will have to commit myself now without even knowing what they want from me. I shall have to leap into the unknown.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘For old times’ sake.’ It was, he told himself, the kind of thing that explorers did. And he was in a hurry to finish with Meares and be on his way: it was his last night in London, and Kiss waited for him in a room at the Cecil Hotel.

  Amundsen hadn’t brought a wireless when he went to Antarctica eight years before. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, back before the war, that far from any base station. And what was the point of it anyway? ‘Dot dot dash hello stop we reached the south pole stop we’ll see you in a month or two stop or if the ice is too thick for the ship to collect us we’ll see you next year stop.’ Instead, he had brought the news himself, sneaking ashore at Hobart disguised as a common sailor, his men sworn to silence until he’d set the stage.

  Even Scott, who had access to the most advanced wireless gear in the Royal Navy’s inventory, who could rely on British relay stations in New Zealand and the Falkland Islands, even he must have understood the principle. When Scott went south that last time he didn’t bring a radio either. What if he had? What if Scott’s people had started signalling from Ross Island as soon as he failed to come back before winter, telling the world that Scott and his polar party were certainly dead? Where was the dramatic tension in that? Instead, the British public had to endure a third winter of silence and then, when the survivors returned by ship, learn everything at once – the collapsed tent only ten miles short of the One Ton Depot, the stoical diaries, the beaten, dying faces in the photos from the pole. Oates walking shoeless and alone into a blizzard. ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’

  It seemed to Amundsen that if Scott had survived, having come a brave second, he’d have gone back to the Admiralty and they’d have given him another dreadnought. He’d have spent the war with the Grand Fleet in Scapa Flow, slowly swinging around his anchor chain. He’d have died of old age, knighted and forgotten. Not now though, not now. Scott was more alive than he was. The news of his death, which broke a whole year after Amundsen returned from his conquest, had stolen all the glory that he’d thought was in the bag.

  Wireless and telegraphy would bleed you to death if you let them. How could a man hide from them? How could he disappear and reappear again, still the author of his own story? On the evening the Maud left the Varangerfjord, with the unlit Vardø lighthouse still a white dot astern, he had left the others on deck and slipped into the wireless office. A few minutes later, when the others smelled smoke, he was already asleep in his cabin.

  At Khabarovo there was a trading store, a militia post, a shed that housed the wireless station, and not much else. Nenets herdsmen in bright beaded clothing sat patiently outside the trading store, hoping it might somehow reopen, while their reindeer steamed and snorted in the sharp August air. Paul Knutsen, who had been this way before and knew a few words of Russian, struggled to talk with the nomadic Nenets, who spoke little Russian themselves. It seemed a warning had come the day before: the Reds were drawing near, were maybe a day away. The White soldiers had left by boat in the night and the traders had gone with them.

  So much, thought Amundsen, for sending messages to London. ‘Then the Russians are all gone?’

  Knutsen listened, then translated. ‘No. There’s still one.’

  He was a blond kid, skinny, about twenty years of age, with heavy brows and a strong dimpled chin. He sat alone in the wireless office wrapped in a blanket, staring placidly over the half-door. He got to his feet when Amundsen appeared.

  ‘You are Captain Amundsen.’ He spoke excellent Norwegian, though with a Russian accent. ‘I am Gennady Olonkin, telegraphist second-class. I will send your dispatches. And there’s a message for you from London.’

  He wen
t over to a cabinet and opened a drawer. Amundsen had expected none of this. ‘How do you speak such good Norwegian?’

  ‘My mother is from Vardø. She married an Archangel sea captain.’ Olonkin took out an envelope and handed it to Amundsen. ‘Here it is . . . May I please ask, Captain, if you need any more hands on your ship? I’m good with engines and I can operate wireless and Morse.’

  Amundsen, fumbling with the envelope, gave him an off-hand answer. ‘I don’t need a wireless operator. Our transmitter is broken. And I like to keep a tight crew. There are already nine of us.’

  Olonkin nodded, apparently untroubled by the rejection. ‘Then would you please take me as far as Dickson Island, then let me off?’

  Amundsen, who had extracted the message from its envelope, now understood. The Bolsheviks might arrive at any moment.

  ‘Well . . .’ he said doubtfully, unfolding the message, ‘I suppose I could take you to Dickson . . .’ He looked down at the message. It consisted of four words in English: ‘Hire this man. Dearie.’

  The ship’s transmitter was ruined – the Norwegians all agreed it would never work again – but the short-wave receiver was still in operation. Olonkin, when not on duty as second stoker in the engine room, spent most of his time in the wireless office. He would sit up half the night, puzzling over urgent bursts of Morse, over fragments of strange speech and music, over a bored voice that came on late at night to read long lists of numbers in English, bookended by a few tinny bars of some old folk tune, one which Amundsen half remembered from quayside farewells in Seattle and Hobart.

  Olonkin was so good at repairs that he could probably have fixed the transmitter itself, if Amundsen had let him. But when Amundsen had first showed him round the ship Olonkin peered into the carbonized guts of the transmitter, poked at the fuse that had started the fire, then turned and looked at Amundsen. Amundsen had stared evenly back. The young Russian said ­nothing and left.

  After that, Amundsen relied on him completely. He needed someone he could trust. In mid-September Maud rounded Cape Chelyuskin and went into winter harbour twelve miles to the south. But its crew wouldn’t spend the dark months doing nothing. There would be magnetic observations, specimen collection, hunting for fresh food, meteorological work. Amundsen himself would be doing some mapping – anchorages, natural harbours, potential landing beaches, that sort of thing – and he needed an assistant who wouldn’t ask questions. Olonkin never asked questions: he seldom spoke at all.