The Still Point Page 6

  In the photograph all this is in the future; the biographer’s subject has not reached the point of departure, when the myth she’d written for him was to split from the one she had to make do with. He has not yet even entered the fog that would shroud him as he sailed from her. But when it descended, this was the cabin that Edward was to read and write and smoke his evenings away in; this was the cabin in which Emily imagined him, and this is the picture that sits on Julia’s desk, the place that she too will embark from. Smoking his pipe as the fog descends: here is Edward.

  Fog and freeze

  The earth turned under the ship, relentless, until the shore was swallowed by the horizon. Below decks, he discovered Emily’s last act of love; unpacking his case of warm clothing, he found among the long-johns and the socks a photograph of her, smiling in the snow, a brief pledge of love written on the back (the ink, when it was found with his body, had almost faded). The photograph Lars Nordahl placed on his captain’s breast when he buried him now sits alongside Edward’s on Julia’s desk. It is not formally posed, or if it was, the subject could not be persuaded to contain herself; framed by frosted pine trees, a laughing, flushed young woman (so much younger, thinks Julia, than she herself is now) in a fur-trimmed jacket and hat. This, Julia thinks, is surely Edward’s Emily, as if the picture was taken from an image in his mind. This was the version of her that he was to carry with him. If, when he found it, Edward Mackley shed a tear, it is not for us to judge him, for heroes too love their wives and fear death.

  He would soon address his crew. He would commend them for their valour. He would set out the schedule of their days, the programmes of exercise, mealtimes, watches, all the necessary measures to keep minds and bodies shipshape. He knew that with adventure comes exhaustion of the spirit, that awe is eventually tinged with boredom; he had lived already through an Arctic day and he knew the longing for darkness, the ache behind the eyes which one cannot tear away from the ice even as they burn from it. And he knew that then the night comes, interminable. The captain’s address would not be touched with pain, or dolour, or yearning, however; it was a rousing speech full of ambition. It is there in the ship’s log.

  The ship’s log was brought to London by the last of the Norwegian crew. The second diary was found, as we know, along with the telescope at the last camp that Edward and his party made on the ice; the same snow-stained pages that Julia earlier abandoned, filled with frozen regret, the record of the yearning he had denied himself on board. But by then he had no crew to speak of, let alone to speak to, and could afford himself a little honesty.

  As the ship headed out into the Barents Sea, the summer fog closed all around them; the Varanger Peninsula had not long vanished over the horizon before everything else vanished too. It was not the clear bright blue that Edward might have hoped for. For five days they passed blindly through it. On deck, the men’s morale was as damp as their clothing; droplets clung to their beards and eyebrows, to be wiped away with a sodden glove. Water ran down their necks, it saturated their skins; soaked cuffs clung about their wrists. They were nothing but leaden smudges in the featureless air; only as they drew close could they recognize each other, put names to the shades they’d become.

  Sometimes it would clear enough to reveal the three masts above them, the sails furled in the useless stillness. These pockets of misted visibility were worse, somehow, than the seamless blanket of the heavy fog. The men shuffled on wetly in the silence. Edward imagined himself on a ghost ship, cords and torn sails hanging listless on the yards, their bones full of the chill, all light gone from the world and their eyes. He began to feel that Persephone had tricked them, leading them into a pale grey afterlife; they had already reached the end of the world and were condemned to sail for ever in this sunless void.

  It went on for days. They kept to their cabins, emerging only for the hourly night watch which dragged by for each of them in turn, with nothing to watch for. Whales, walruses, Krakens from the deep could have passed their flank by inches, and only the sudden roll in an otherwise waveless sea would have betrayed them. The dogs, battened down in their kennels on deck, rested their muzzles on their front paws and looked mournfully up at their Russian keeper with flat, saddened ears, every coarse hair tipped with dew. The Norwegian crew were stoical, but Edward’s English companions did not know these seas, and had expected splendours after the beauty of the hard, cragged coast they’d set out from. Only Samuel Freely, who had sailed with Edward for the Northwest Passage seven years before (netting and pinning a host of Arctic Whites en route), knew what a northern summer was. Still, his spirits were as numb as his fingers, and he could summon for his friend little comfort. Mealtimes were dismal affairs, false jollity washed down by disappointment. They moped below decks and turned in early.

  On the sixth day a bank of dark blue appeared to starboard, as if a line of ink had been drawn across the centre of a wet page; it seeped at the edges, but there it was, undeniable, darkening and hardening into contours as they watched. And as the air cleared they became sure that what they could see was land, not some trick of the water and light. Within hours, the bird-streaked coast of the islands of Nova Zembla emerged from the ocean, black and grey, crammed with the squawks and settling feathers of the summer nesting. They navigated the strait around the tip of the southern island and emerged into the open Kara Sea, stretching north, north, to a watery horizon. A blue sky arced glorious over them, almost liquid where it touched the sea and seemed to soak into it. The men stretched out on the deck in their sun goggles, lolling against each other, as if the ship had transformed into a lido. With the wind in the sails, they sped forward. How lazy, they laughed, adventure could be. To the Pole, they cried, and don’t spare the dogs!

  In his cabin, a month after leaving his wife on the shore, Edward woke in half-darkness and knew that dawn was close; and something else too. They were nearing ice. He could feel it. He knew where he was from the moment he woke; for the first time since they left the coast behind them, he did not expect to find her beside him. The sea shifting under him had become his own lymphrhythm. And he knew, too, that the sea was beginning to freeze, although it was not yet August; without so much as standing up from his bed, he knew it. He could smell it, although it was scentless. Across the bridge of his nose, under his eyes, like a frozen sneeze he felt the pinch of it. Ice.

  He dressed quickly, pulled on boots and gloves and coat and left his cabin. Only Janssen, the cook, was awake below decks, peaceful and floury in the galley. Edward’s stomach, tight with excitement, barely registered the comfort of the baking bread; it was knotted up with that other evasive but undeniable scent, ice, ice.

  He came out on deck. Lars Nordahl was on watch. Edward was wary of him — he’d been ship’s mate on many a whaling vessel, recruited in Trondheim (with the bulk of the crew) for his experience and the respect he commanded, and he thought of this explorer’s expedition as a well-paid whim. He was liked by the men, powerful, broad, with a mass of copper hair, and Edward had to struggle against the awe of the child within himself who had dreamed of Vikings.

  ‘We’re nearing the ice, Nordahl.’

  The Norwegian, gazing north, did not turn. Edward joined him at the rail and saw it was not insolence that kept him silent; it was the same taut thrill that had gripped his own dreams.

  ‘I felt it in my nose when I woke this morning.’

  Lars turned his large head and looked down, impressed, at his captain for a moment, before turning his gaze back to the sea. In the quiet morning, this jocular, expansive man was subdued. In the pit of him, a depth of calm like the fjord he was raised beside lay placid, and his spirit was stilled by the palemisted dawn.

  ‘Frazil, Captain,’ he said, with a nod to the water. ‘And grease ice further out. Your nose told you true.’

  The sea they were sailing had turned glutinous; it rolled without breaking, its dark surface covered by the rough-silk sheen that was the first sign of freezing.

  ‘We’ll
reach the first floes in days.’

  ‘It’s early in the year for that, Nordahl. But I believe you’re right. It seems it will be winter soon enough.’

  Mare Congelatum, it is called on ancient maps. The sea congealing.

  Julia holds the edge of her desk and feels her hands clench around imagined metal, feels the chill crystallize; as a child, she stood so on a ferry to France, at the back of the ship, which, she had learned, was called the stern; and with a suitably stern, resolute expression she imagined herself an adventurer.

  I would be brave and strong like Edward, I would sail through the floes, I would not die in the snow; the whip and cling of my skirt in the salt wind, the ice-white cliffs become a great frozen wall.

  Emily, almost home now, sees the English coast loom out of the grey dawn, and holds fast to the handrail to steady her mind. She gathers her skirts about her as she steps onto the gangplank and imagines that the next time she sets foot on a ship, it might be to meet her husband, home from the sea. She breathes the brackish air, the last of the sea-mist freshness mixed with the pungent, gritty odour of the shrimp hauled onto the docks; she wonders if she will ever sail again. She will not.

  Edward’s hands grip the rail, his black eyes bright. The Pole draws closer. He is returning to the frozen sea.

  Nightfall

  They sailed on; the sea thickened and slicked into an undulating, elastic transparency before greying and turning to rubble; true to Nordahl’s word, the first of the solid fragments were soon upon them. It was bright still in the sunshine, and warm, and the holiday atmosphere prevailed, but as the evenings drew in faster the nights grew cold. They were snug below decks, swaddled in layers of insulation and heated by the galley at the centre. Out in the night air, they could feel the frost all through their gloved fingers. Edward breathed it in and took joy in every breath.

  The floes grew thicker, more persistent, packing close, the smaller chunks crunched effortlessly under Persephone’s wide keel. The stuff of Simon’s nightmare, and those of the whalers who in years before had risked these waters — chasms narrowing, closing in. But Persephone had reached the home she was made for and no longer rolled with the ocean; the open water had all but vanished, filled and frozen with ice. They smashed a way through or found gullies between, until they gave up on negotiating routes and allowed the ice to grip and release her at will, knowing she could stand it. At dawn and dusk, a daily cycle, it rolled and piled in extraordinary forms all about them; the men on deck saw mountains, monsters and beasts rise and topple, abstract complex geometries, gigantic crystals glinting off every surface and smashing slowly into glittering facets. And everything suffused with the sunlight that left its colours lingering, flaming brilliant gold against the cobalt sky for an hour before fading to pearlescence, the shadows hollowed out in deep lucent blue. As the dark drew in each evening, and the last of the colour gave in to the edgeless half-tones of moonlight, Persephone ached and groaned as the gullies narrowed about her and squeezed, squeezed, the ice insisting itself up her sides, forcing itself upon her with a giant’s roar, threatening to turn her, crush her and drown her deep in the freezing underworld. And then slackened and left them in peace for another uneasy night. As the ice packed the men were quiet, contemplative, then raucous in the evenings against the silence when the din had settled and their ship had triumphed once more. No, she would not go under.

  The nights grew longer until the days could hardly be said to have broken; the sun nudged at the sky for a few scant hours, hesitantly broaching the horizon before flooding the snow red again as it retreated before the quiet advance of twilight. Early in October, in the last of these ruddy evenings, Edward gave the order to make ready: they had been held fast for days now and could neither shift nor break a path; the ice had them gripped for the winter. Ten days later, the men drank a toast to the return of the light, in 1900. The sun had set.

  A collection of ink drawings between marbled boards illustrates this part of the tale; Julia lifts and turns each one delicately, with the proper reverence for old paper. The work of an unknown artist, survived by his impressions of the wilderness that engulfed him; a vision of a brave ship stranded. And a silhouette against the snow: Edward standing at the prow, a captain on watch; Persephone perched several feet above sea level, as if lifted from the waves and abandoned on the crag of an ice mountain.

  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.