Isvik (36 page)

From north to south the Weddell Sea is the better part of a thousand miles, and sailing the course dictated by Ángel, not direct, but jinking from lead to lead, often with one of us balanced on the foremast yard brackets to con the ship, we managed to make steady progress along a line 192 degrees, which cut the coast well to the west of the BAS base at Halley Bay, even to the west of Vahsel Bay on the Leopold Coast, and not a hundred miles from where Shackleton's
Endurance
was beset on 18 January 1915.

More and more, as we made our southing, our movements were controlled by the ice, which gradually became thicker, less degraded, and the leads between fewer. There was a storm on the 12th, a real Antarctic blizzard with driving snow, wet and sticky, so that it clung to the wheelhouse and masts, and during the cold of the short night had to be chipped off with ice axes. With all the cargo we carried on deck, there was always a danger of the ship's centre of gravity being so badly affected that she became top-heavy. The thought of being rolled over in these waters in the dead of night with the black, snow-laden wind gusting 70 knots was not attractive!

Once the storm had blown itself out, the sky cleared, and our whole icebound world became still and beautiful. This summer interlude lasted four days, and with no wind we had to motor, the lanes of open water always enabling us to steer a generally southerly course. But conning the boat was a strain, the ice so dazzling white that the sun's reflection seemed to burn into our eyes, even through dark glasses.

The two girls took advantage of the brilliant sunshine, and armed with bottles of sun lotion disappeared behind a canvas screen they rigged for'ard of the mainmast on the port side. I forgot about this at one point when an open lane, narrowing to what appeared to be a cul-de-sac, forced me to run up the ratlines and search ahead for a way through. In fact, the lane we were in was not a cul-de-sac. Instead, it bent sharply round to the east, to an icebound lake, a polynya, from which several dark threads of open water led southwards again.

Once I had satisfied myself that the way ahead was still open, I stood there for a moment, balanced on the yard brackets, enjoying the endless vista of broken ice, the sun and the breeze of our passage. I was watching the slow emergence and submergence of a couple of
Orcinus orca
, the so-called Killer Whale, the white of their bellies looking almost muddied by contrast with the brilliant whiteness of the world that was their playground. A seal surfaced almost alongside us, and as I watched it heading for the bow wave on our port side, I found myself looking straight down at the two figures behind their canvas screen, their skin glistening with suntan oil. They were lying buttocks-up on their stomachs, one darker than the other, but there was a beauty and an innocence in the way they lay there, stark naked and totally exposed to my gaze, so that I held my breath for fear even my breathing would break the beauty of the scene.

Then one of them stirred. It was Iris and she rolled over on her back, her eyes open and staring straight up at me. She smiled and waved, and I hurried back down, feeling embarrassed by the way I was suddenly swelling up. I think by then I was slightly in love with her myself.

Perhaps because of the nature of my thoughts it did not shock, or even surprise me, when, late that evening, I saw Ángel walk up to Go-Go and put a hand on her buttocks. I was on the port side, helping Nils pump a canful of paraffin out of one of the deck drums. The sun had just set, a bright orange flaring, the sky streaked with lines of thin white vapour interspersed with cold, translucent green. It was very beautiful and, the can full, I straightened up, standing there, staring at the wonderful Turneresque colouring of it. Go-Go was taking in some washing she had pegged to the guardrails, her body bent down, the fabric of her pants stretched tight across her bottom. Ángel appeared as a black cutout in silhouette against the evening light, his hands reaching out to caress her.

She reacted quick as a flash, straightening up and brushing his hand away. She said something, I couldn't hear what, but he took no notice, reaching out both hands to grasp hold of her. She seized one of them and for a moment I thought she was pulling him into her. So did Ángel. He laughed, and in that laugh was the excitement of conquest. He had, I think, a firm belief that he was irresistible to women. But then she suddenly bent down, jerking his arm forward and at the same time twisting it. The effect was startling. With a cry of pain his body was bent sideways and he went sprawling over her shoulders to land up flat on his back on the deck.

Before I could move Iain had erupted out of the wheelhouse. Go-Go was standing there, looking down at her tormentor. I couldn't hear what she said to him, but her voice was tight with fury. Then she turned, almost colliding with Iain, who, to my surprise, ignored the figure slowly picking himself up off the deck and addressed himself only to Go-Go. ‘Ye're a bloody fool, girl. Suppose he'd caught his head on a steel deck plate or the corner of the hatch there?' He left it at that, adding, ‘Don't flaunt yerself or we could end up on a voyage without a purpose. Find yer husband now. Tell Andy Ah want to see him in the wheelhouse.'

‘Why the hell are you blaming her?' I demanded as she ran, crying, for'ard along the deck.

He glanced down at Ángel, with an expression of something near to contempt on his face, then turned to me. ‘Think it out for yerself,' he said and went back into the wheelhouse.

You would expect a man losing face like that to cover it up with a show of anger, at least retreat into his shell. But not Ángel. He got up off the deck with a quick, lithe movement. ‘Some girl, that!' He winked at me, then walked away with his head held high and a little smile on his face as though he'd enjoyed the experience of being thrown on his back. And that night, at dinner, he seemed as easy and charming as ever. It was Go-Go who sat silent and watchful, a sulky, withdrawn look on her face.

It should have been a happy occasion, for at sunset, with no wind and surrounded by ice, the sea so still the surface of it looked like burnished pewter, we moored
Isvik
to a floe and went below. It was the first time since Ushuaia we had all sat down together for the evening meal. Nils had opened a bottle of red Chilean wine, but even that did not lift the brooding tenseness that hung over the table. At the time I put it down to the realisation that we were nearing the point at which we would have to take to the ice, might even be beset and locked in for the winter. But in retrospect I think it went much deeper than just a matter of nerves. Each of us had our own personal and very different reasons for being seated there at that table in the quiet of the saloon on a ship moored in the midst of a world of ice.

We were like the cast in some strange theatrical drama, sitting silent at that table listening to the sound of the sea sucking at the ice floes, grinding them together as the current shifted them, and conscious all the time of something waiting in the wings. There was little or no conversation, all of us, including Nils, seeming to be locked in on our own thoughts. Go-Go and Andy had their own personal problems. I had already come to the conclusion that he was tiring of her. She was, I guessed, sexually very demanding. He often looked washed out, or as Iain put it more crudely, ‘The laddie's clapped out, so ye just watch him.' And he had added, ‘Also he's scared, and so is she.'

By now we all knew that she had only come because she couldn't bear to let him go on his own. She was desperately in love with him, and he was for ever trying to escape into a world of his own, the world of air waves and disembodied voices that made no demands on him. And Ángel, looking at her hungrily across the table, smiling a relaxed smile, while Carlos watched, his eyes eager and full of jealousy. Periodically I glanced across at Iain. Iris was sitting beside him, her eyes on her plate, both of them silent. And when she got up to get him a second helping of seal meat and rice, I found myself looking right through the scarlet of her polo-necked sweater and navy-blue trousers, imagining her as she had been when she rolled over and I had found myself looking down on her naked body sprawled on the deck below me. Christ! It made me ache for the feel of her.

‘Make certain, Pete, ye get an accurate fix tonight.' Iain smiled at me and I had a feeling he knew exactly what had been in my thoughts. Later, as we stood together in the wheelhouse, he said, ‘Women are the devil on board ship.' He was jotting down chronometer times and angles as I took the star sights and called out the sextant readings to him. ‘Aye, but it's not for very much longer.'

‘How do you mean?' There had been a note of finality in his voice.

‘Ye'll see. Soon as we reach the Ice Shelf and get to the point where our progress along it is blocked …' He left it at that, and in the small hours, as the light increased with dramatic suddenness at the imminence of sunrise, our windspeed indicator at the mainmast top began to spin with a nice little breeze from the north-east, so that Andy and I were able to get the ship under way again.

Ángel should have been on watch by then. I left Andy at the wheel and went down to rout him out. He was always doing that, lying in and waiting for the watch on duty to call him. His bunk was on the port side aft and the door across the cubbyhole that did for a cabin was slid to. I flung it back, annoyed at having to come down to call him when he had a perfectly good alarm clock and I had sounded the change of watch on the ship's bell. ‘Time you were on watch,' I told him, and I shone the beam of the powerful deck torch I had with me full on him. His face was turned away from me, only the back of his head visible. I stood there, staring, for there were two heads on the pillow and it was Carlos who slowly turned and looked up at me, smiling softly like a cat that's been at the cream.

Abruptly Ángel flung the duvet top of his sleeping bag back and swung his legs across Carlos, reaching with his feet for the floor. They were both of them naked and I swear the boy winked at me, that little devil peeping up at me from out of moist, slightly pink-looking eyes. I cut the beam of my torch and left them in darkness, feeling oddly shocked, which was silly of me really since I knew very well Carlos was a homosexual. But it's one thing to guess at somebody's sexual appetite, quite another to see him practising it. And with Ángel, who was just old enough to be his father. Christ almighty! The thought was there in my mind, quite suddenly, quite unbidden.

There was, of course, no indication of anything untoward when Ángel came into the wheelhouse fully clothed and took the helm, repeating the course Andy gave him in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice.

It was a pity I didn't have the satellite pictures I was shown later by one of the Met. officers at Mount Pleasant. They were basically weather maps, and it was possible, when the cloud was thin, to see the extent of the pack ice, even the degree to which it had degraded into brash. Some of the bigger bergs, too, that had carved off the Ice Shelf – I was told there was one over seventy miles in length, a 1986 Landsat picture showing some thirteen thousand square kilometres floated off, the Belgrano base gone and the Filchner with a new front where the great Chasm had been. But the weather maps did show the darker patches at the base of the Weddell Sea that meant open water. These were quite large in the east, but gradually thinned out towards the west till, beyond the Filchner, they were little more than an intermittent thread of dark at the eastern end of the Ronne Ice Shelf.

Had we had one of those satellite weather maps on board we might have found the nerve to push on through the dangerously narrow leads to the next open water patch and even beyond. As it was, having sighted the Ronne Ice Shelf on the 21st through flurries of snow, and sailed right up to the sheer front of it the following day, we hesitated about pushing our luck much further. The open water was gradually thinning. Soon we were motoring through thread-like passages no wider than twenty feet, with the distant Ice Front gleaming white like chalk cliffs in the crystal sunlight on our port side and bergs of all shapes and sizes huddled in fascinating, sun-eroded shapes to starb'd. We could see bits of the Ice Front carving off in great chunks, rolling and tumbling into the water and tossing us about in the waves it created, and whenever we were in broader waters there were always growlers and bergy-bits to contend with, so that we gradually became exhausted with poling off to keep the bows clear of the much larger expanses of ice hidden beneath the surface.

We got as far west as 61° 42″ before being stopped by a tabular berg that looked as though it had broken away from the Ice Front quite recently. Between it and the Front the pack had layered, great up-ended shelves of ice lying higgledy-piggledy. It was no place to venture, we thought, even though there was a slender line of dark water stretching away north that looked as though it might lead round the berg and out again into the flat ice prairie of the pack.

We dared not risk it, and so we laid out four mooring lines with grapnels on the ends to the surrounding floes and shut down the engine, relying on wind power, of which there was then plenty coming straight off the Ice Shelf, to keep our batteries fully charged. That was on the 25th and Andy managed to get a weather forecast from the
Polarstern
, or maybe it was from the BAS base at Halley, I'm not sure which. The outlook was fairly good for the next few days with winds from south veering through west to north-west. Strange, but I still found it difficult to accept that the Coriolus effect makes a veering wind in the southern hemisphere indicative of low pressure conditions, causing them to vortex clockwise, not anti-clockwise as would be the case north of the equator. Most of my previous navigational experience being in northern waters, my instinct was to regard wind shifts that followed the clock as blowing from out of a high pressure system.

‘Well?' Iain was standing in the wheelhouse facing Ángel who had come up to listen in on Andy's conversation with the Halley people. ‘How far is it? We're west now of the 192 degree bearin' ye gave us way back. How many miles d'ye reck'n we got to trek across the ice?'