Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  One night in her half-sleep she saw his plane seized by one of those torrents of the upper air which the Japanese had lately discovered. She saw him blown far from Spitsbergen, held up by mirages and magnets and ionic emanations. He was flying above an ice-free northern ocean having found some secret geography – a new island or continent, an Anián Strait or opening in the globe – in strange vapours that welled from the magnetic pole. She slept for a few minutes and heard his voice above the slipstream, arguing with his French pilots about which country would claim the discovery.

  Morning came, and with it more newspapers. Krasin, the famous Soviet icebreaker, had been diverted from a mission to far-off Cape Chelyuskin and was ploughing towards the marooned Italians. It seemed to Bess, who had little use for sentimentality, that this grey tortoise would win where the planes had failed so romantically. And then, with no visible men left to rescue, the world would stop pretending that Amundsen was still alive. It would be time for her to act again. Where would she go?

  The sun shone in through the curtains as they twitched in the mild summer air. Through the half-open sash the traffic noise soothed her; she loved cities as much as she loved wilderness, and mountain and forest hemmed Oslo on three sides. She closed her eyes, sank back in her armchair and flew to a ridge above the city. There she stood among the spruces that had followed her all through her life, from Winnipeg to Oslo. She thought she could smell them, even here, in her armchair, from which she looked down at the tiny boats whose wakes creased the fjord like wrinkles on silk. She slept without dreaming and didn’t wake until noon.

  Gade called again that afternoon. He wanted to take her for a walk around Oslo, a tour of a city that still hardly knew itself as a capital, which many still called ‘Christiania’. She’d driven around the town a few months before, at Christmas, in a motor car with Amundsen, but he hadn’t wanted to be seen in public with her and had hurried her on to Uranienborg. She accepted Gade’s invitation; she felt that the chance would not come again.

  They visited the Storting, the harbour, the Akershus and the new underground railway to the National Theatre; it had only opened days before and was still an object of fascination for country visitors, who rode its carriages in stiff Sunday clothes. For once Gade had little to say for himself beyond a few muttered dates and descriptions. Bess wondered why he’d suggested this tour when his mind seemed to be on other things. Then he led her down a little side street, almost an alley, near the East Station, and stopped in front of a cheap-looking guest house.

  ‘That,’ he said, pointing with his chin, ‘is where Johansen was staying when he did away with himself.’

  ‘Johansen?’

  ‘Hjalmar Johansen. He went to Antarctica with Roald in the Fram.’

  ‘I don’t think I remember him.’

  Gade was still looking at the guest house. A heavy old woman, well dressed, but with the mean fleshy face of a debt-collector, came out and glared at him. Bess saw him hold her gaze for a few seconds then coolly turn away. Does he know her?

  ‘You’ve heard of him alright,’ Gade told Bess as he led her away. ‘He went to the Antarctic with Amundsen, but he was already famous in his own right by then. He’d been with Nansen years before when the two of them left their ship in the pack and tried to walk across the sea ice to the North Pole.’

  And she did know that story. It had thrilled her as a child in Manitoba, translating the frozen Red River into the Arctic ice sheet, stands of snow-bent birches into the islands of Franz Josef Land. But the name of Nansen’s companion hadn’t stayed with her. That’s what happens to the other men of history. She’d heard the name spoken once at a lecture in Winnipeg. She had heard it as ‘Johnson’.

  Gade touched her elbow, steered her westward onto Karl Johans Gate.

  ‘Johansen was an expert skier and a very promising army officer. But after the ordeal with Nansen he couldn’t cope with normal life. People said he was like a changeling, as if the real Johansen had been lost on the ice. He’d spent months dragging a sled and a canoe across the sea ice, then a whole winter in a snow cave on some godforsaken island with starving bears clawing at the door. And if that doesn’t sound bleak enough, he was alone the whole time with Fridtjof bloody Nansen. When he got back he drank away his commission. His wife and children left him. Then he begged Nansen to help him, for old times’ sake. So Nansen got him a job with Roald.’

  The royal palace frowned at them down its dark avenue. At the junction with Frederiks Gate they turned left, then right onto Ibsen Gate, skirting the royal park. They wouldn’t be visiting the palace today.

  ‘Roald had heard that Johansen wasn’t the man he used to be – everyone knows everyone else here, of course. But he took him on as a favour for Nansen, who then had the power of yea or nay over Norwegian exploration.

  ‘What Nansen didn’t know was that Roald wasn’t going north, as he’d told everybody, but to the South Pole instead. Peary had just announced that he’d been to the North Pole, and Roald never saw any point in being second. But all of the money which Roald had raised was for a northern expedition, which was supposed to be scientific, all the usual guff about measuring ocean currents and water temperature, all sorts of thing that Roald really didn’t give a damn about: they were just cover for his real aim, which was to search for new lands and be first to the North Pole.

  ‘Now Peary said that the North Pole was taken. But the South Pole was still there to be won. So Roald decided to go there instead. But he wouldn’t tell anyone about his change of plan until he got to Madeira. Under the circumstances, Roald felt it wise to grant Nansen the favour he’d asked for, advance damage limitation before the fuss began. So he hired Johansen.’

  Bess had first seen Amundsen six years before. He had stood at the rail of the SS Victoria as it sailed to Nome from Esquimalt. She had already known he was on board: everyone did; it was in all the newspapers. He had watched Vancouver Island slip past in the dusk, black pines with red trunks that glowed pink in the sunset. She had passed him three times on the rain-slick deck before she could find anything to say to him. She had never approached a man before. But he’d seemed to her more than a man. He would never have addressed her himself, she was sure. He was above that sort of calculation.

  ‘Was Johansen no good then?’

  ‘That depends who you ask. When they got to Antarctica he accused Roald of endangering lives; they set out for the pole too early in the year and were driven back by a blizzard. One man got left behind and would have died if it wasn’t for Johansen, who brought him in single-handed. So Johansen was right to complain. But that didn’t matter to Roald. Right or wrong, he had to be the boss.’

  Gade will soon have me thinking of him as Roald, she thought. She couldn’t bear that.

  ‘You’re saying that Amundsen mistreated him,’ she said shortly.

  They were approaching Solli Plass and the National Library. It was a warm day, for Oslo, and students were walking arm in arm, talking and laughing, turning their faces, like flowers, always to the sun.

  ‘Not as Roald saw it . . . He spoke to the others in ones and twos behind Johansen’s back and when he was ready he called a meeting and told Johansen that because of his insubordination he wouldn’t be going to the pole with the main party. He’d have to stay behind at their base.’

  A thin strip of grass appeared on their right, with a handful of benches shaded by beech trees. Gade steered her towards this forlorn little park. A tram clanged to a halt right in front of them, forcing Gade to stop and wait for it to move again.

  ‘As soon as they got back to Tasmania he kicked Johansen off the ship. Johansen drank what pay he’d been given and had to wire Roald’s people in Norway to beg for a third-class fare home. They paid it just to keep a lid on things.

  ‘Fram made a slow passage homeward, milking the triumph, so Johansen actually arrived back in Norway before his old ship. He was in a te
rrible state, begging for money again. Roald’s lawyer put the strong arm on the Oslo papers, warning them not to have anything to do with Johansen or they’d be cut off from the hero explorer when he got back.’

  ‘So Johansen wouldn’t tell his own side of the story?’ No wonder, she thought, that Amundsen had taken to the air. Up there he was absolved of all responsibility. Except, perhaps, the obligation to land.

  The tram had moved on but still they stood facing each other.

  ‘That’s right. Though Johansen never did try to make any trouble. He was quite the good soldier, for all of his problems. And the polar triumphs meant such a lot to Norway back then. We’d only just got our freedom from Sweden and we needed to show we deserved it. To us, Nansen and Amundsen were winning generals. They gave us a name in the world. Without them, we’d have had to make do with the likes of Munch and Ibsen.’ He seemed to find this privately amusing.

  Taking her elbow, he steered her across the tram tracks, under the trees.

  ‘Just over there,’ he said, ‘about a mile past the palace, is the big park of St Hanshaugen. That’s where the crew of the Fram were put on a stage for the crowd to cheer. All except Roald, who was already too grand for that sort of thing. Johansen wasn’t invited but he turned up anyway and watched it from the crowd. He was very drunk, of course.

  ‘Then someone recognized him and he was shoved towards the stage with everyone cheering him, because he’d been one of the two biggest heroes in Norway not long before. Very few people knew about the row in Antarctica.

  ‘He was halfway up the steps when Roald’s lawyer jumped in front of him and told him to clear off, right there where everyone could see and hear them. To make matters worse, the lawyer was a brother of Nansen, whose life had been saved by Johansen many times over.’

  Gade pointed to a wooden bench under a dusty-looking beech tree. A young couple sat on it, murmuring softly, about to hold hands.

  ‘And now Hjalmar Johansen is forgotten in Norway. Otherwise those kids over there wouldn’t be courting on the bench where he shot himself.’ Gade pulled a face. ‘The police searched his hotel room after they found him. All he had left in the world was his shaving kit. When they turned his body over he was smiling.’

  Ten days went by. The Russian icebreaker rescued Nobile. The foreign air crews packed up and left. The journalists drifted south, their stories written, and for a day or two they crowded the Victoria, eating and drinking and talking too loud. Bess, who had become quite free in her ways, walking in the streets and hills each day, kept to her room again. She didn’t think that they knew enough to look for her, but she wasn’t yet ready to give up the game. Then the journalists were gone and it was time for her to leave too. It was still barely August but there was a smell of the fall in the hills above town.

  She found a lawyer on the Akersgata and took him to Gade’s private office near the harbour. There, against Gade’s strong advice, she signed a notarized document waiving any claim she had on Amundsen’s estate. She asked only for enough money to set her on her way. The family should arrange it. She’d never trouble them again.

  ‘You understand,’ Gade had told her, ‘that I can’t act for you in this, or for the family either. With Roald gone I no longer have any part in the family’s decisions. And I have to return to my embassy in Brazil this week. From now on you’ll have to deal with Gustav Amundsen yourself.’

  ‘I only want travelling money. Amundsen had plenty of cash put aside. Tell them that if they don’t give me some I’ll have to stay here in Oslo. They hardly want that, do they?’ Bess was quite ruthless about money when money meant freedom.

  ‘I’ll talk to him before I leave. But until Amundsen’s will is sorted out – and it’s bound to be disputed by his creditors – let me lend you some cash. You can pay me back when Gustav pays you.’

  Bess refused. She had her principles. And she knew that she wouldn’t get a penny from Gustav after she left Norway.

  That evening Gustav Amundsen phoned her from the lobby, proposing to come to her room. She remembered the slow way that he had looked at her the previous Christmas when she visited Uranienborg. She declined his suggestion. Also, the lobby was for her a more promising field of engagement. Her awkward presence in smart hotel lobbies was the currency in which she would trade.

  Gustav Amundsen resembled his brother, except he was older, bearded, fleshier about the torso and face. Bess took him for a drinker. He had, she knew from Gade, wasted an army commission, ran businesses that failed. There had, she guessed, been disgraces. She would dispose of him easily: many such men turned up in Alaska but they seldom lasted there for long.

  They sat together in the corner of the lobby beside a tall vase of peacock feathers. Now Gustav would barely look at her. He was watching the doors. It was quite dark outside and the lights of automobiles flared on the windows. The lobby was quiet; most of the guests would now be at dinner. If I have chosen the ground, she thought, then he has picked his hour.

  ‘I have no ready money that’s not tied up in the will,’ he told her. ‘But I can still help you. My brother left some valuables in storage. They appear on no official inventory of his estate, so the creditors won’t look for them. Furs mostly, and some jewels, which he collected on his travels. If you took them to London or Paris you might easily sell them. They’re worth thousands of dollars.’

  ‘I don’t deal in furs,’ she told him, though in point of fact she had done little else for the past fourteen years. ‘Kindly sell them yourself and give me the proceeds. There are plenty of dealers in Oslo.’

  Gustav watched a young woman crossing the floor. She was a tall Norwegian girl, fair-haired and quite beautiful, but she seemed lost and self-conscious in expensive New York clothes. The girl sat, all alone, on a sofa across from them and awkwardly crossed her legs. Anywhere else, thought Bess, I would say she was a prostitute. Gustav couldn’t take his eyes from her.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ he said, reluctantly sparing Bess some attention. ‘The person who’s minding the goods for my brother won’t give them to me. She’s being unreasonable. She says she’ll only give them to you, in person.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘I’ve already discussed it with her. She’ll meet you at the Høsbjør Tourist Hotel tomorrow evening. It’s near Hamar, a couple of hours out of the city on the main line to Trondheim. If you go up on the train she’ll have a motor truck ready to bring you back to the city again. With the furs.’

  She considered him in profile. From the side he resembled Amundsen quite closely. He was still staring at the girl across the lobby. She’s almost a child, she thought. About as young as I was when I first met Amundsen.

  Gustav had given Bess a name: ‘Mrs Christine Bennett’. An Englishwoman, from the sound of it, or American, yet living in Trondheim. Whoever she was, Amundsen had trusted her above his own family. There’ll be some sorrow in this business, Bess thought, as she took the train north from Oslo to Hamar. I’ll just have to meet it head-on. Forests and lakes scrolled past her ­second-class window, moving smoothly into her past. But I’ll be back this way tomorrow, she told herself. And she would be free by then, a different person. She felt a dizzying surge of ­impatience. It ought to be tomorrow already. Why should she have to do this? Was it to rob her of freedom that Amundsen had sent for her? Is that what possession had meant to him? Was that why he’d flown away in the end?

  The Høsbjør Tourist Hotel belonged to the same company as the Victoria Hotel in Oslo; it had been arranged for a car to meet Bess at Hamar station. The car took her up a side road through several miles of fields and woods to a high hillside, almost a mountain, from which the hotel looked over the sweep of Lake Mjøsa. The Høsbjør was a quaintly muddled building, with asymmetric wings of two and three storeys joined by a tower with a little round turret. The lobby surprised her – marble and pine, and bright flowers. It was busy with foreign tourists
who had come there for the air. She had expected much less of Gustav Amundsen, with his greasy eyes and his second-class train ticket; this was the sort of hotel where she and Amundsen used to stay when not in the wild. It was one of the things that had brought them together, the taste for hardship laced with luxury. In the Waldorf Hotel, at the Olympic in Seattle, they had stolen their comfort together. There had always been someone else to pay the bill.

  A room was ready for her in the side of the tower that faced on the lake. It must, judging by the view from the window, be one of the best rooms in the hotel, and she wondered how she’d come by it, given Gustav Amundsen’s stinginess with rail fare.

  She sat by the window to wait. Presently, she saw the hotel car depart again, winding out of sight down the driveway through the birch trees. She was still watching an hour later when it returned. It stopped out front in a huddle of porters but the woman who got out had only one bag. Bess couldn’t see the face beneath a flat woollen cap. She was tall, Bess thought, dressed simply in London-cut tweeds, and though she looked slim she moved with some years on her. Then the woman stopped on the gravel below and looked up at Bess’s window. Bess, meeting her eyes, knew now who had paid for her room. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door.

  Mrs Bennett was still in her travelling clothes. She had emerald green eyes and dark blonde hair. Bess gave her the chair by the window then sat on the end of the bed; the arrangement reflecting the gap in their ages: Mrs Bennett must be in her forties. But the self-conscious way in which she crossed her legs reminded Bess of the young girl in the Victoria the night before. She’s ­Norwegian, Bess guessed, not really English. She probably isn’t used to this sort of arrangement. I’ll have to be nice to her.