The Ice Lovers (3 page)

As for the man who is here with me, he is a surprise, and very much alive. I see all of them in him, their brokenhearted destiny – the dead men of this continent in their felt coats, woollen mittens, their pathetic provisions which stripped them of their strapping musculature as they hauled their sledges across its chrome surface. His great-grandfather was one of them. He has their physique – tall, well-proportioned, his intelligent brown eyes. A firm jaw, built for teeth gritted against the daily cyclone of the ice desert. The discerning, convince-me gaze he fixes me with, always, as if he is trying to decide whether I am friend or foe and changes his mind. Now friend, now foe.

We cannot avoid each other, even if we might want to. I find I can only feel desire when it is intertwined with sadness, or loss, or some dark valour that has nothing to do with any individual man. He is no hungry ghost, he is alive; sordid, beautiful, vague. Married. Not someone who inspires neutral feelings. Hostility or desire, yes; hatred, hostility and desire, a fiery helix of confusion. He is like the wood you find in stairwells of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. His very existence confirms that there is a submerged level in all of us, down several flights of stairs, through tunnels, dank labyrinths. There, nameless animals are alive and ravenous with anticipation of their next meal. These are our true selves, our vacuous battered souls. If I sit still I can feel them sometimes – a gnawing, a scavenger's footstep in my innards. Their fluttering little hearts, their sharp, insolent teeth.

2

After the meeting David walks – no, he stalks, he has been accused of this before, a long, swinging, laird-of-the-manor stride – the corridors. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, despite its gleaming new exterior, is inside a relic. He swishes past the history, portraits of queens, kings, prime ministers, the corridor leading to the Middle East region, to southeast Asia, these sumptuous, well-funded sections with their terror analysts, their breakfast briefings with MI6.

This is where he had yearned to work, these hot regions of the world. For so long the polar regions office had been no more than an internal outpost. Although now of course they were very nearly the centre of a conflict, and he was suddenly deserving of his seigneurial stride: ‘Polar Guy Comes in from the Cold,' his colleagues joked.

His release from professional exile had been so sudden his old habits still needed to be shaken off – long lunches, perusals of scientific journals close to his heart, conferences and symposia on glaciology, physics, marine biology. Science was a passion he could no longer indulge. Yes, now he was Arctic and Antarctic Man and they took him seriously, because the polar regions had caught up with the rest of the world. Polar Man was vaulted from the musty basement, where he had been hunkering with his reindeer skins, canvas jackets, his stories of icy sorrow and defeat, into the cauldron of politics.

Men like David had been running the country, if not the world, forever. He was not a dreamer. He remained uncaptivated by ideals. He thought in terms of manoeuvres and outcomes, like a military tactician.

Or rather this was the man he had tried to be, and failed. Because he was a dreamer; he was moved by ideas. He had never, not once, sat around a meeting table and not thought about some woman he had once kissed a long time ago, what his wife was doing at that precise moment, or dwelled on the challenges of manhauling across a glacier field, with its tumble of ice boulders. He had never been consistent, or certain, or acquisitive. He could no longer stand what and who he was, or loved and respected what and who he was. He could bear himself, but not what he did for a living. He accommodated these opposites within himself effortlessly, allowed them to rotate on a dais; perhaps he had inexhaustible incarnations up his sleeve. Who would he be tomorrow? Only someone he had not been today.

‘Yes,' Edward his boss had said, as they were ranged around that long mahogany table. ‘There's a journalist. No, an historian.' He looked down his nose at his notes. ‘She's interested in that incident. I don't know why. She won't discover much, in any case. I'd like you to include chaperoning her in your annual visit, if that's all right by you.'

If that's all right by you. This was not all right by him, but what could he do? ‘What do you think she knows?'

‘Not much. She's talked to colleagues. The parents won't talk, of course.'

‘Did she tell you that?'

‘No, we got that from Cambridge.'

He will take coffee in his office next, he decides, while reading confidential briefings on Russian territorial expansion, on methane release from a thawing Siberia, on the mass extinction of krill blighting the Southern Ocean. Well, he thought, on the way there: three weeks there, another week travelling. Although he had never gone to the Antarctic and returned on his intended date. You simply couldn't schedule things as you could in the rest of the world, or any other situation.

A month away. That night, he would tell Kate.

David, alone of his immediate colleagues, takes public transport to and from work; he lives in the Thames Gateway, an area of regeneration, buoyed into existence by the Olympic Games. But the city ran out of money, for everything – gleaming antiseptic stadia, accommodation, transport infrastructure. At times his journey home frightens him. It is against his principles, but he is thinking, finally, of buying a car. The Olympic debacle had impoverished the capital, and he alone of his Chelsea-and-Fulham colleagues has to deal with the human rubble. He takes the Jubilee Line to Stratford, followed by an overground tram on which homeless men sit slumped, shuttling from one end of the line to the other, home to his gleaming showroom apartment overlooking an empty Thames. High up in his glassy water palace he thinks, how amazing, that eels once migrated here, that fishing boats once plied the wide estuary.

He receives a message from Kate. She will be out tonight, she is informing him, at one of her classes – Pilates, French, Yoga. He texts back, ok. Just the two letters. A man of few texts, as Kate says.

While waiting for the lift he thinks of the years he has spent attending conferences: Cold Facts of the Arctic, meetings of the Antarctic Place-Names Committee, of which he is chair, the Polar Symposia at the British library, meetings at the Geographical Society in Kensington. In the summer he goes to the Arctic, in the winter to the Antarctic. He rarely sees darkness; only London is dark, caught in a perpetual night, whereas the two axes of the earth shine in an inevitable white daylight. The Antarctic is his favourite of the two polar regions, although he feels guilty, on an intellectual level, for comparing them. It has something to do with the raw monumentalism of it, and its absurdity, which transmits itself so effortlessly to life there: in the Antarctic he becomes a child, the Fool, the spontaneous clandestine he really is.

But also he admires how Britain has managed to hold onto its claim to this remote part of the world, the opposite end of the Atlantic ocean. He loves the insanity of it, how on the way there he flies twelve thousand miles only to end up in Britain, or at least the version of Britain which is the Falkland Islands, or British Antarctic Territory, patrolled by Union Jacks and a faded Edwardian patriotism. He loves how everything is upside down: the seasons, the constellations. His release in this, his strange clattering euphoria.

He had wanted to be a scientist, and somehow that hadn't happened. Now he is surrounded by them and he is only the administration man, influential as he is, signing and dotting treaties, conference papers, government memorandums, laws, jurisdictions, while the scientists are searching for the key to the mystery.

Of the mystery itself, he is certain. The Antarctic is no accident – an iced continent does not form by fluke; no, it's meant to be there, this remnant of Gondwanaland, the ice cap at the bottom of the planet which drags its energy field down, so heavy that from space the earth appears not as a sphere, but more like a pear. If the Antarctic did not exist, the earth could not support life: the climate would be too irregular, the ocean circulation system would brew up a volatile, unfathomable world. He has met many, many people who thought: what's the point of the Antarctic? An empty ice wasteland, we can't even go there because the whole place has been ringfenced by sanctimonious scientists. What's the point of such a place? Little do you know, he thought. And, maybe that's for the best.

Of late, the world has become a place he is no longer certain he wants to live in. His glassy estuary palace, renewing his ID card, getting Iris scans for his new passport: he spends so much time complying with the surveillance superstructure yet feels a powerful urge to evade its gaze. But it is not so easy. Oyster cards have been twinned with identity cards, so that movements through the London transport system can be tracked on a live database. Purchases recorded on supermarket loyalty cards have been uploaded to the national database. Each email, the sparse text messages he sends, these too are logged. He is caught in a vast digital web. But who or what is the spider? He fantasises about ditching his Oyster/ID card hybrid and buying single tickets; it will cost him a fortune but at least he will be able to avoid ‘them'. When he confides this thought to his brother, Ben gives him a steady look. ‘But you're one of “them”.'

Not in the Antarctic. No, there he was no one. No satellites are trained upon that empty slice of space (and if they were, he would be one of the very few people to know about them). He is alive in an age of monitoring, surveillance, profile-building, tracking; a wargames era with little handto-hand combat, only surgical strikes, tactical collateral damage. What would his great-grandfather have made of it? The man who, after narrowly failing to die on Elephant Island, had enlisted within two weeks of his return to England, then narrowly failed to die on the killing fields of northern Europe. In comparison David considers, he is living in a shadowy, cowardly time. One thing he is truly afraid of – disease, an epidemic, possibly one of the first real effects of the warming – stalks the land once more, for the second time in four years, a highly communicable strain of virus, as do strange environmental puzzles: Elm trees are losing their leaves from a mystery fungus, triggered by warming, the total collapse of honeybee populations causing a collapse in pollination, causing agricultural output to plummet 16 per cent from where it was in 2010. Storms scrape at Britain, more violent each year.

All this his brother had foreseen; Ben had told David and he hadn't believed him. At the time, Ben was an anomaly, a futurologist. Uncertain times sent people to soothsayers, although David had never expected to find himself living in such an era. And it was not individuals, but banks, governments, the corporate world, who went to visit Ben and his crystal ball. Just another economist who can tell the future, Ben had joked, at the beginning of his career. And then he found he could.

He turns the key to his front door. His flat is exquisite, he admires it himself, each time he enters. Ships glide up and down the Thames. In the distance, the cupolas of the Barrier. A soft estuary light.

Kate has left not even a coffee cup, not even the imprint of lipsticked lips, on the counter. She has washed and dried up so thoroughly that drops of water have been banished from the sink. On the sofa a book lies open, seemingly casually, but this is the copy of Don Quixote Kate has been trying to read for some months now. She is a woman who sets herself tasks, a self-improver.

He takes a quick look in the bedroom. What does he expect to find? Kate in bed with another man? Kate's belongings disappeared from her drawers, the clothes from the railing?

He makes himself a cup of tea, and the phrase comes to him unbidden – an old Antarctic saying, left over from the Edwardian explorers. It meant ordinary, everyday heroism, it meant the genteel comforts of English life transported to that blasted place. He misses the old days, when he went along in the Otters just for a ride, an extra pair of arms, an extra shovel. In the old days they would all pile in to go dig out a Low Power Magnetometer, a sensitive temperature probe, near the Pole, shovelling down through four feet of snow. Then they'd climb into the Otter and fly back to base, all laughing – pilot, field assistants and useless officials like himself along for a jolly – saying, home for tea and medals.

3

Good ice year, bad ice year – this is what Antarctic veterans call them. A good ice year is when the ice forms to the thickness of three or four feet. A good ice year only comes one year in ten, now.

The sea-ice incident happened in a bad ice year, also the plague year, the summer thousands died from the virus. Because of the larger catastrophe, the incident was barely mentioned in the press. Helen caught only a glimpse of it buried on page seven or eight, classified as Home News, even though it had taken place twelve thousand miles away. At the time she hardly took notice of it, cloaked as she was in her own season of grief. Still, she had enough interest to clip it from the newspaper and save it in her haphazard scrapbook (scrapyard, she privately called it), increasingly a graveyard for never-to-be-written stories, articles, and books that would remain only phantoms.

Nearly three years later, she fished the yellowed piece of newsprint out of the scrapyard and did a bit of research on the internet. She found almost no mention of the sea-ice incident, only the story she had seen, archived on the newspaper website, and a Polar Research Council press release.

Her discovery of the article coincided with a larger shift: it was time, she decided, to get serious, to take her life of writing features journalism and her abandoned PhD in history and solder the two together. It was time to write a book, to see these places, meaning the polar regions; she would write about them just as she had written about child soldiers in the Lord's Army, about tribal politics in Afghanistan, or HIV infection rates in South Africa. She would find the untold story and she would write it.