The Survivor (31 page)

“… so even though we're flying well over the height of the mountains, we'll be making a dogleg round Cape Adare. That's somewhat safer.”

In a sight-seeing fervour, Belle grasped Ramsey's arm, distracting him from the officer. She pointed past the navigator's back through the floor-level pane of glass to her right front. Two miles below, through lazy cloud almost transparent in the sun of early afternoon, a distinct berg, big as an atoll, spined and contoured to make two peaks, was passed or seemed deliberately to pass them by. Both its mountains cut the thick and, to Ramsey's mind, transmogrifying fog, exposing it as a merely climatic state, exposing Ramsey as the same flat man, unendowed with new substance.

“In another fifty minutes or so,” the lieutenant-commander told them, “we'll actually cross the circle.”

To compound this lack of transformation, McMurdo Sound brightened before them all afternoon, and the Erebus volcano stood up, engaging as a ski-resort, when they banked across its slopes at five o'clock. Ramsey squinted at the broad normal sky, like bright winter skies over sheep towns he had taught in when young. The world, he told himself, was growing less and less diverse, more and more pointlessly uniform.

A brusque landing was made on steel skis. The forward door opened, white glare and the cold swept in. Belle, already stationed for her Antarctic entrance and encouraged at the elbow by a boy orderly, stepped out first; then, threatened by the light and fumbling for sun-glasses, Ramsey. His eyesight adapting, he saw Belle being helped down the steps, setting dazed feet on the ice-shelf, making wading movements with her arms, clearly doubting that her senses and her lungs could get the measure of the foreign air. A massed welcoming party seemed to be assuring her, but she continued dubious. Capable of all the pomp of judgment, Ramsey followed on, enjoying the apt stumble of those soft traducing feet.

And as if her discomfort were a judgment on her, he felt justified in his rudeness to her earlier that afternoon when, after a talk with Hammond, Belle had come and sat beside him. At the time, Ramsey had been looking west through the lifting vapour at the wan mountains of Victoria Land; an impressionist sun lay painted in four complex strokes of saffron on an ice-floe beneath him.

“Alec, did they tell you that there are cameramen and three journalists at McMurdo Sound?”

“I knew there were a few pressmen. I didn't know the exact numbers.”

“Yes, well they're the numbers. Actually three, and Hammond makes four.”

He did not resent her any the less, and had thought of asking her whether four sufficed.

“A regular task force,” she had said, “ready to document our every quirk. So you have to allow me to say it, Alec; I beg you and I demand that there'll be no quirks. Really, I won't stand for them.”

He knew he needed warning in this authoritative way. But he must never allow himself to accept her moral authority. “All right,” he had agreed. “Since you have Hammond charmed, it
would
be a shame if the conquest wasn't extended to the entire press-hut.”

On the ice three cameramen were evident. One, a sailor by the chevrons on his peaked hat, filmed equably; but working for networks had given the others an indigestive energy. They played with the calibrated rims of lenses, and grunted like lovers or sea lions. At something that was part their request and part command, Alec and Belle repeated their advance to the tangerine vehicle readied to race them away across the ice-shelf, towards tangerine helicopters. In this way the widow and Ramsey were mated by view-finder, and Ramsey became on film what he had once daydreamed of—the friend doing service for the widow.

Indoors at McMurdo Station, in heavy warmth made from the piped exhaust of electric motors, they faced their press conference. Alec, still dazed, sat by expecting, despite himself, the same radical change he had looked for earlier in the day. He found it hard to attend to the sharp voices of the journalists; his ears seemed drawn to insulated sounds, the murmur of off-duty officers in the wardroom next door. He flatly answered the few questions aimed at him and, in his state of contrived numbness, could see that he would not easily be able to do himself harm: one of the few communicable images that could easily be fitted to him by pressmen was that of awed ex-comrade.

He was taken by surprise when Belle, not distracted by suspicions of some coming explosion in the cortex of the brain, announced what would be done with her husband's corpse. If Leeming could not be found, the pit would be reverently closed and prayed over. If Leeming could be found, he would be buried on the hill above the base, on Observation Hill, just beyond the crest, facing west.

“This site,” she said, “was kindly suggested by the admiral.” She threw a hand in the putative direction of New Zealand. “Admittedly this little town looks rather industrialized, but they tell me it's only a small feature in what can be seen from up there.”

That he had been with her all day, and failed to ask her for such facts, made him anxious now for his sanity.

At dinner the base commander told them that digging could not go on beyond the next few days; most of the summer personnel had already left for Christchurch or North America. He would permit Mrs Leeming, he said with a sly Irish smile, to visit the pit site in the morning only if she got a full night's sleep, no big-eye, no waiting up for the midnight sun.

At three the next morning Ramsey woke in the same buffered state of alarm as he had fallen asleep in. He went walking through the streets of the settlement. Bare earth which he bent to touch was frozen. The sun stood at a narrow angle over the scarps of Victoria Land. Whenever the town came close to earning Belle's judgment, “industrialized”, its streets led you to a sight of Scott's first hut, a stroll away, brown and like a failed grazier's homestead. Turn, and he saw Observation Hill, where Leeming would be, to his honour, buried in rock or permafrost. The trouble of making a hole up there, on that freezing slope!

There was already a cross on the hill, he could see, Scott's cross humped there over two days by bereaved men in an age of murderous innocence and fatal sentimentality.

Inside, he found himself fevered and neuralgic.

Belle seemed grey, and possibly had not slept. Even so heavily wrapped, she showed aspects of her age that Ramsey had never noticed before. She seemed brisk enough, no health risk on the long helicopter haul she now faced. Hammond carried her duffel-bag of survival clothing, and there was this difference to her: she did not accept Hammond's concern as tribute to her, as at eighty-five she would still no doubt accept kindnesses from polite businessmen at airports. Here she needed her bag carried; the way she walked testified to that. Never had she seemed older.

Ramsey climbed into the thick warmth of the machine, and sat along the wall. His cheek that faced the cold hatch ached in its sinusitic manner; on his left the caged motor of the rear shaft made sickening heat. But as Hammond and the others boarded, cherishing private and commercial cameras, he was grateful that the motors were too raucous to allow talk.

He remained placidly anguished. The blare of the machine gave even his eyes a certain torpor and privacy. As yesterday he had not been able to conceive a time beyond his arrival, so now his imagination persisted in the message that after the pit was reached, time in its accepted meaning would not continue to deliver itself, second by second.

The machine rose at a tilt, and jerked along the ice-free coast; then out across the sound to a west glaring with white mountains. Once during the journey Belle leant to him and shouted, “Alec, be good, won't you?” For some reason transcending eardrums, Alec heard and nodded. Those of the others who were not distracted by scenery tilted an ear in false hope of a press statement.

The western side held ice in the seams of its complicated coast, last winter's ice that had not found a clear strait up the sound. And massive ice, an ice-tongue, with dim blue water to the north. Then he felt the helicopter pitch and enter the course of a glacier, a neat glacier to his eyes, a geography-teacher's dream, seamed and waved at its edges, its lines of flow enforced by streaks of moraine, its north side charred with the black emergence of mountains. To the helicopter's front bulked theatrical ice-falls and summits.

Alec twisted in his seat. They would not make him believe that that spectacular white trench was the scene of his and Lloyd's hard survival. So when they swept low once over a scatter of portable huts, and a crewman threw a smoke bomb out of the hatch to read the wind force, Ramsey found himself gazing for the result with a genuine tripper's interest. His standard anxieties, no worse in this sunny, stage-managed iceway than they had often been at home, snaked about his belly as the machine plumped down between bamboo flags. Motors fell back to a lower pitch of chugging. Conversation was possible if you screamed it forth.

What was largely fear, and the desire to verify kindred fears in others, made him speak to the widow.

“Are you afraid, Belle?”

She merely smiled, like someone with a professional care on hand, and patted his gloved hand. And though this was the supreme arrival, time went on secreting itself; there came no explosion in the cortex.

Instead, he jumped down onto firm snow, and helped the widow out. Belle had her fur hood zipped to the nose, but stood making eyes of avid gratitude at the men who ran in wincing beneath the churning props to help her to the site.

Ramsey stumbled after.

A man with lieutenant's bar on the peak of his snow-cap deployed away from Belle's elbow and faced the straggle of visitors.

“Mrs Leeming and gentlemen,” he yelled, “welcome.”

In a most authentic manner, the cold licked at Ramsey's cheeks like something interior to them, some hot-cold facial cancer; and the added Antarctic violence of the helicopter swept them as the machine lifted sideways and went.

“You must first come and have coffee in the mess,” the lieutenant concluded. He led them to a wood-framed hut of canvas, already drifted up to chest-height by the late blizzard. Inside, a portable generator hummed, making light and a startling moist warmth. The alternations of hot and cold that his hosts had provided for him woke again Alec's face pains, his fever.

Meanwhile the party were shedding their outer clothes and draping them on chairs. Before them stood a servery, and behind the servery, a bare-headed, open-necked boy pouring coffee.

“If you would care, gentlemen, to help yourself.”

The lieutenant sat Belle down and fetched her coffee. And, as if Ramsey was in need of further dazing, announced, “You'll notice that I've taken the liberty of ordering a certain medicinal additive in the coffee. I trust none of you object.”

The men rumbled with approval. Belle gave a dazzling smile. With a trace of jealousy, Ramsey knew that Belle admired this brand of courtesy sitting so well on the tanned and rugged features. A man of thirty-five, a paterfamilias far from his familia. Some decades back, Belle would have eaten him without salt.

Saved by the generation gap, the man talked to them while they drank. He hoped that the visit to the summer station would not be too painful for Mrs Leeming, nor for Mr Ramsey, to whom this glacier was unhappily known. He thought that it might help if he told them in greater detail the background to the … the event. A team of ice physicists from Colorado were interested in a range of ice properties that could not as readily be studied by drilling an ice-core as by working on the sides of an open pit. He implied that the ice properties under examination were of a venerable if not too practical scientific nature. The radioactivity of snow contaminated with thermonuclear fallout; the regularity of strata in a glacier; dating snow by the study of its hydrogen and oxygen isotopes; stress and movement. For the sake of examining stress, the pit would be marked and covered when the ice men had finished their summer studies, and revisited the next year.

So the pit was dug to a depth of nearly sixty feet, one side terraced and provided with aluminium ladders.

“There are patterns in ice,” the lieutenant said, “even in moving ice. A peculiar conformation was spotted, just above head height. The wall was probed with a pick, and a series of objects were uncovered.”

Knowledge of having behaved with respect pushed down the officer's lids. In the man was apparent a certain feeling of kindred towards Leeming: wreath-laying fervour at its best. If Ramsey had not gropingly cuckolded Leeming and passively murdered him, it would have been possible for him to be touched.

“We knew about Leeming and his Australians,” admitted the lieutenant. “It was pretty clear what this debris might mean. The pit was closed immediately. Another one, a little upstream, was dug for the use of the scientists.”

He ended by saying that before they all visited the grave of a brave man he would like to express his pleasure at being of aid to his widow.

There recurred in Ramsey an amazement that had become familiar during the past eight days: that the concrete world—an odd pattern of ice deep down—kept verifying what, he believed in his guts, had taken place on a higher or lower or
beyond
plane of being.

He had let his coffee go tepid, and drank it with distaste. Others were already pulling on outer coats and sun-glasses, and zipping furry hoods to the nose.

“Isn't he kind?” Belle asked him loudly. She would spend her last days praising American graciousness which, by cultivating all the apt emotions, had very likely conjured up in her a wistful and not unpleasant feeling for her own widowhood.

Beyond the double door the light flared in their faces. Ramsey fumbled for his sun-glasses and blundered into hock-deep furrows made by the wind. It seemed that at contact with these crusty seams, sickening memories surged in the soles of his feet. All he could hear were boots hissing through the rind of the glacier. Glare robbed him of his sense of up and down, of ridge and hollow. But for a litter of crates, but for the black line of mountains on the left, there would have been no perspectives.