The Still Point (9 page)

In the strange arrest of the Arctic night, there was no wind and nothing to stir in it anyway. The ship’s engine, dismantled, was silent; she had been stripped of sails, and the masts and remains of the rigging were stark, already brightly frosted against the deepening sky. She might have been there for a hundred years or more, freezing slowly into the semblance of her own white-glittering phantom. In the afternoons the ice still heaped itself against her like some ancient beast with a thorn in its side. They rose above; she forced the ice under and they were borne up, at a slight list to starboard which interfered with dice games but otherwise gave no trouble. Now, in the hour before midnight, the beast had moved off once again, and Edward almost found the distant stomp and growl of it a comfort, a part of the profound peace he had recovered. He felt rather than heard the far-off boom of pressure in his chest, looking out over the strange country that had formed and set around them, boundless and muted as far as the horizon. The men below deck were resting after supper, playing cards, listening to Lars’s tales of Scandinavian conquest with laughter and genial envy. Edward smiled. In England, his brother would be sitting by the fire, lighting a cigar; how strange, he thought, that they should share this ritual when there were so many miles between them, and they were in every way remote.

Filling his mouth with peppery smoke, Edward savoured the cedarrichness of tobacco on his tongue. Gazing at the red glow, he felt his whole self condensed in that ember; he was nothing but a tiny spark of light, of bright brief life, on an incommensurable plain. On those twilit nights, he felt as insubstantial as the evening he surveyed. His breathing slowed to become part of the quietude he had forgotten, and longed for without knowing it, since
he was last locked in these seas. Far in the distance, the deep heart-boom.

The full moon was bright enough to see by, flooding the ice milk-blue; a ring of light circled it, and above it hung another orb, only the faintest waver betraying it:
paraselene
. Edward said the word to himself: a mock-moon. It seemed somehow congruous, in this place of phantom land and phosphorescence, which might have been another world entirely. A different sphere; nearer, perhaps, to heaven. No tumult of angels, no press of pudgy cherubim, no rush towards glory, but just that stillness, the dark sapphire immensity with its doubling moons and silver lights. They coursed above him, shivering a gossamer sheet across the apex, winding golden cords across the rosy sky, the lilac, jade, ice-blue sky… When he thought he had caught at a word to describe it, it changed again to elude him. If he were a god, he thought, he would spend his nights at this play, far from the flawed and petty makings of the world that turns below. He would spend his nights thus, casting silver webs across the sky.

As the smoke on his breath thinned into the mist of an ordinary exhalation in the cold, he flicked the stub of his cigar over the rail. Watching its arc burn bright, he sensed a movement on the edge of his vision, out on the ice; something alerted by the sudden glow. He turned his head slowly, and slowly took up the rifle propped by his side. His gaze found that of his prey. Two pairs of bright black eyes met across the ice. A white fox, so far north in winter but sleek, not starved, with one paw raised and frozen there; wary or impudent, he could not say. She sniffed the air and smelled him: tobacco, cured meat, Norwegian ale. The musk perhaps of his armpits, for his blood was high now despite the cold. He felt it thudding in his head (and the ice, far off, turning with a boom); he was all eyes, ears and sharpness: a hunter. He raised the gun
to his shoulder, the fox still frozen to the spot. Alone on the ice there, the only living thing for miles around besides the deep, hidden fishes, and the dogs and men far from home. There had been no snow; her step was sure and almost trackless on the ice. She was ready, paw raised, to run. Edward fired.

The peace of the evening erupted into frantic shouts and barking as the men rushed on deck at the sound of the dogs’ frenzy. The shot had broken their twitching slumber and they snapped and bayed, straining and pacing in a chaos of teeth and fur. Anton Andreev calmed them in the Russian they seemed to understand. His favourite, Anna the old bitch, whined towards him and he took her long head in his hands, letting her lick his face; yesterday she had bitten one of the whelps to death, but Anton couldn’t help but forgive her.

They searched for Edward, calling for him over the dogs’ cacophony on deck and below, until Freely, knowing his friend better, pointed to a dark figure on the ice. Edward had climbed down from the deck and reached his kill, and was kneeling to inspect her. A clean shot to the heart. He lifted her like a babe in arms and made his way back to the ship, with no triumphant trophy-bearing.

‘I’m sorry I woke the dogs, Anton. My brother would never allow me to let a beauty like this pass us by.’

 

There is no white fox in the collection at John’s home, of course. She sank, presumably, with the ship.

Edward caught at least one other. He describes it in the diary he took with him to his death: ‘A fox on the ice today. Shot it with one precious round. She was weak with hunger, as we are. A pity to watch her last breaths. Call it an act of mercy. Our vegetarian is now a happy carnivore, picking at the carcass
and sucking at the bones like a child on his thumb. We skinned the meat and divided it as fairly as we could, and ate her raw. Foolish to waste fuel on fresh meat. We are become as savage as the dogs, which tore at each other out of boredom.’

In fact, the days of boredom were long past; the dogs had wolfed their dead companions down, skin and all, one by one as they fell or were shot for the only meat Edward could afford to spare them, until there was nothing left but two corpses. He is reluctant to go into detail and does not, or cannot bring himself to, record if the men too ate their own pack, who had dragged them, panting, for so many miles towards their goal. But he writes that their keeper Andreev is starving and ‘yet cannot take what meat there is’. Julia, who is not squeamish, hates to think of them feasting on the fox in grim silence, but cannot stop her mind worrying at the scene:

One day, near the end, this is his only entry:

These are the pages that Julia couldn’t bear to read this morning, now safely closed and waiting on the desk to be revisited. She has set out with him from the beginning, and this time will not fail him; in time, she will come to this part, and give death its due. But there were months of dull civility before barbarity set in.

Julia is bent forward, chin resting on the desk, peering into a thick, greenish glass jar. The jar has a label that reads — in the elegant copperplate of a man with time to take care over his handwriting —
Porifera, Crustacea, 18 August 1893, Beaufort Sea, 72° 21’ N, 125° 64’ E.
A sodden sponge floats sadly in the murk; if we peer a little closer, just as Julia is, we will also see a collection of very tiny, pale eight-legged things, some specks of silt; the alcohol only faintly discoloured urine-yellow; and, beyond, Julia’s yellowed eye pulled wide by the curve of the glass then retreating. She sighs; she struggles to find the contents interesting and it is true, they are rather dull.

Indeed, even Edward, the label’s author, would agree; and yet it was from the depths of this inauspicious specimen that his illustrious, if brief, career was born. Drifting off the coast of Canada as a green young officer, it was his task to dredge and examine silt samples from the sea. Having little else to occupy himself with, he did his duty and wrote out label after careful label in his cabin (Julia, imagining him thus, lends him Simon’s stoop). Once, on an impulse prompted by boredom, he took a sip of the preserving liquid, and his curiosity was rewarded by a violent attack of vomiting. Edward was not a scientist by nature any more than he was by training.

On his second expedition, he personally undertook no such experiments. The monitoring of flora and fauna, scant as it was, fell to Dr Wilkinson, who had little else to attend to as the small crew remained in remarkably good health
for as long as they remained on ship. An acquaintance of John’s, a fellow collector keen to see his trophies in living motion, he had volunteered with the Geographical Society’s backing. He was not a seafaring man and could not grow accustomed to calling young Mackley, who as a swaggering lad had poked fun at the postures their mounts were made to adopt, his captain; he called him by his first name as he always had done. There was no lack of respect meant and no offence taken. Edward accepted him as his brother’s friend, and an elder, with a right to familiarity.

writes Edward in the ship’s log–the one that he left with the ship, in which he entertains himself with such observations of his companions and their lives on board through the long months of winter and summer.

He is even-handed and cautious, of course. When Hugh Compton-Hill, the diplomat’s son, refuses the taint of meat and insists on a greater share of the precious vegetable matter they have brought, and will otherwise eat only porridge, bread and chocolate, Edward seems to indulge him. ‘It’s true the boy’s eyes are bright and his health and energy excellent,’ he notes. He cannot
betray doubt or distaste. It is his duty to preserve them all — not only to bring them home, but for history. These months must make good reading, for they precede his victory, the victory of
Persephone
over the top of the world, and his diary will be the account of it — the camaraderie, the good cheer, the courage.

 

Julia turns the pages carefully, making occasional notes to herself, points of cross-reference and queries to verify later. The months pass with little incident, until she catches at a sound from those pages and hears, as if she were there, the chink of glasses and a toast to the Queen. A favourite scene so often conjured that she feels the eagerness of approaching festivity as if she were once again listening to Aunt Helen tell it; as if it were a childhood December, pine-scented and fairy-lit and thrilling.

 

Christmas 1899: a holiday. They were far from land now and long since locked into the sea. The crew were relieved of their duties, such as they were. Christmas Eve’s after-dinner entertainment was provided by the making of garlands, and they decked the saloon with scraps and oddments of paper, tin foil and bright cloth. Edward smiled to see them, the frown of concentration creasing Nordahl’s wide forehead and the paper snowflakes falling from Freely’s clever fingers.

Edward woke in the morning feeling, absurdly, a frisson that had last seized him when he was a boy of six or seven, waking early in the dark and feeling the hush of the house charged with expectation, a full bladder bursting with excitement. Knowing that below him in the drawing room lights were twinkling and presents waiting, and seeming to smell already the spices on the
air (and indeed, although this didn’t touch young Edward, the cook and parlour maid had been up for hours).

A break at last in the monotony, which seemed to have stretched so much longer because there was so much longer to go; and a gift, not beneath a glittering tree, true, but immediately below his bunk and just as brightly wrapped. Something of Emily to make her memory new, which he had resisted opening all those months.

For the crew she had given a dartboard to hang in the saloon, with an inlaid message around its rim: TO THE
PERSEPHONE
— A TARGET TO PRACTISE ON! How wonderfully simple, that bright red bull’s-eye, unwinking at the centre of the perfect circles. Edward, the marksman, would hit it again and again in the year to come until it seemed to taunt him with its ease, while their true target lay so many miles to the north and they seemed to draw only inches closer by the month. Tock — the dart hit home again — We’re not yet even on an outside ring, he would think — tock — we’ve barely hit the cork — tock — embedded here as if in the wood of the wall like one of Compton-Hill’s poor efforts. He would sigh and pluck the darts out, returning to the line; three bull’s-eyes again, for all the good it would do him.

But as a Christmas morning’s entertainment it was a resounding success, and the captain’s wife was roundly toasted — especially as she had also provided a generous batch of cigarettes to add zest to their wagers. The winners, leaving the field to the gasping hopeful, made frequent retreats to the galley to smoke (much to Janssen’s affable annoyance as he basted and chopped). So the hours before dinner were spent, after a breakfast of marmalade, fresh bread, Gruyère, and the first of the day’s treats: a Christmas cake from their cook, with the luxury of marzipan, iced like the landscape in miniature, sculpted with a knife
(‘
Zaztrugi!
’ cried Andreev. ‘Like the wind-blown snow!’) and planted in the centre with a Union Jack.