The Ice Lovers (12 page)

He stuck his hands in his pockets and straightened. A blast of wind hit him in the back, and he lurched toward her, stopping just shy of her body. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘It's not unusual, but it means we'll be late getting away. There's a lot of cargo to be loaded I hear.'

‘I'm actually relieved,' she said. ‘I wanted to spend a few more days here.'

He raised his eyebrows. ‘A few more days to get blown down by the wind and shop for stuffed penguins?'

‘I sort of like it here.' She threw her gaze out to Ross Road, taking in the brightly painted houses and picket fences, the Araucaria trees, the gift shops that catered to cruise ship tourists which lined the harbour. ‘It's surreal, flying all this way only to end up in the UK.'

‘But it's not the UK at all. It just looks like it is; actually the Islands are becoming more and more South American.'

‘Do you come here often?'

‘Once a year, usually. Some years delegates come from the Islands and we meet in London. I always feel relieved not to have to come all the way here – carbon guilt and all that – but I find that if I miss a year, I miss the Islands. It's strange.' He frowned, obscurely. ‘So, are you going to the Curry Night tonight?' The hotel's weekly menu stated that Wednesday was curry night, Thursday pizza night, Fridays was an asado – a barbecue. ‘I guess that's the one Argentine word the islanders let pass,' Helen said.

‘No, there's quite a few, actually,' David said, with enthusiasm. ‘All the words for horses' tack, and for sheep-shearing, are from Patagonia. They call each other “Che”, too, which is as Argentine as you get. Although you have to be a real Falkland Islander, born and bred, to earn the right to be called that.'

There was the faintest tinge of politeness in Helen's expression. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I have a tendency to lecture.'

‘That's all right. I have a lot to learn.'

They went their separate ways, then, Helen into the wind, and David down the street, blown along by ragged gusts.

The following day the wind dropped; in the summer, Helen had been told, windless days in the Falklands were rare. On David's suggestion they went for a walk to Gypsy Cove – he usually did this walk when he had what he called ‘downtime' in the Islands.

They set out along a footpath which skirted the harbour and FIPASS, the floating dock facility where they would board their ship in two days' time. A fisheries patrol vessel was moored next to the Resolute.

‘That's where I'll be tonight,' David said, pointing at the destroyer. ‘Officially, it's a drinks party. But I have to sneak away and discuss something with the commander.'

‘Something,' she smiled. ‘I see.'

‘Well, you're a journalist, aren't you? I can't exactly spill the beans.'

‘I used to be a journalist. I'm more of an historian, now.'

‘But you're writing about something that happened four years ago. That's journalism, not history.'

‘I don't think there's any rule about how much time has to pass before something is considered history.'

They walked on, picking their way through the dense scrub of the shoreline. Clumps of spiny moss, like shrunken shrubs, threatened to trip her up. ‘That's Diddle-dee,' David said. ‘It's actually a shrub, although it's so small you'd never think it. There's an amazing biodiversity on the Islands, considering how barren they are. There's even a native strawberry. You'd never think anything so delicate would survive here.'

‘You know a lot about the Islands.'

‘I've picked up a few things over the years. Interminable UK Overseas Territories Conservation conferences, that sort of thing.'

She had the impression that the rueful tone was somehow for her benefit, and that David actually enjoyed these conferences. She might think him a jobsworth civil servant, someone towing Her Majesty's line – sherry parties, House of Commons lunches. And he might be right, she might have made these judgements, had they been anywhere other than in the suspended animation of the Falkland Islands, walking together past rusting hulks of abandoned ships to look at penguins.

‘Why don't they get rid of these things? That's the fourth wreck I've seen in the harbour.'

‘There are ten in all, maybe eleven. They're part of the history of the place. Who would do it, anyway? They've got no value as salvage.' This might be the voice David used in meetings – impatient, clipped, enamoured of the facts. ‘So what is it that interests you about the sea-ice incident?'

She had been waiting for this question. That it came now, between gusts of wind as they walked up the powdery track to Gypsy Cove, was merely a matter of timing. He'd been wanting to ask it, she had sensed, since they had met.

‘I met someone who knew her, a friend of hers. She showed me some of the emails she sent from base that winter. And –' here she paused as a sheet of wind tore the words from her mouth. ‘I was intrigued. She wrote very beautifully –'

‘ About what?'

‘About being in the Antarctic, about what she was feeling, what she was experiencing.'

‘There were rumours that she lost it, basically.'

She ground to a halt. ‘You mean, lost composure?'

‘I mean lost sanity. But I didn't want to say that.'

‘I don't think she was insane at all.'

He studied her. She could imagine him thinking, I've hit a nerve, there. Or perhaps, that's what women always say, defending insanity out of some suite of emotional hurts.

‘Most people think it was suicide.'

She had heard this, too. Beside her, he was waiting for her reaction – how she would weigh in on the issue.

‘I don't know. I never write my story before I write my story.'

‘The Antarctic can be a very bad experience, or it can be very, very good,' David observed. ‘It's hardly ever anything between.'

‘Thanks for that,' she said.

‘You know, I didn't ask to be your chaperone. I don't work for the PR department. I work for the Foreign Office.'

‘I didn't ask for a chaperone. The only reason I have one is that you have something to hide.'

‘I have something to hide?'

‘Not you personally. But, I mean –' here she flung her hands down in frustration. ‘Someone died here. Did you really think there would be no interest in this? That no one would care?'

‘We let you come down, didn't we? If there were anything to hide, that wouldn't have happened. Why are you interested in it? Is it some indirect vengeance of yours?'

He was smarter than she thought, this man. She did not answer, or tell him the reason for her interest, because she did not know herself. For the first time in her adult life, she had decided to allow a mystery to overtake her. She could not explain her motivations.

Depending on how well she got to know this man standing beside her now, dressed in a blue windbreaker and a boyish knit hat, she might tell him why, as far as she understood it. She might tell him everything. Nothing about him invited her confidences; perhaps that was why she wanted to give them to him.

David was walking ahead of her now, making his way down to the beach, threading through the Danger! Land Mines! signs. She hadn't seen these since Afghanistan, ten years ago. Although the mines lining the Falklands shores were much older. They had been left deliberately, as a live memorial to the war. Occasionally sheep wandered into a minefield and were blown up.

Ahead of her on the path down to the beach, David turned. His body had a ‘aren't you coming?' inflection. He was stiff, she decided, it was there in the way he walked – a tall, upright man, a militaristic bearing, but also somehow the posture of someone who had missed his calling. This was a subtle, vaporous impression, but it was there.

‘The clouds –' she pointed to where grey clouds spiralled in the distant sky, like a tornado.

‘Oh, we'll get a bit wet. Don't worry.'

‘As long as we don't get blown up.'

‘That I can't promise.'

She followed David down the path to the beach. As she descended, she noticed little hillocks on either side of the path, framed by an aperture, perfectly round. These were the burrows of Magellanic penguins. The penguins themselves had gone for a swim. She watched as they emerged one by one or in pairs from the sea, shaking themselves dry at the edge of the breakers. Magellanics were small, dinner suited creatures. The penguins waddled up the beach and right past them, as if the two humans did not exist at all.

2

It was late afternoon when Luke left Bluefields. His co-pilot, the nervous field assistant, was so exhausted from their days of shifting fuel drums that he'd fallen asleep on takeoff.

In any case, whether Andy/Mark was awake or not, he was flying alone. Not that the younger man didn't talk, rather Luke was struck by how little this new generation listened, a deficiency he was convinced was linked to their inability to live in the moment, preferring to take photographs out the window before turning the camera on themselves to take a self-portrait, already basking in their audience's amazement. They were too busy recording the moment to live it.

Nara had been different. She was quiet, thoughtful. She had listened to his stories of the years he spent flying in Alaska, the Yukon, the landscape made ragged through successive waves of grandeur, glaciers, the rigid permafrost, hurtling seasons of melt. He had seen some wondrous things beneath him, he had told her: the mighty Mackenzie River, snaking all the way up to the rim of the continent, herds of caribou gathering and dispersing across the tundra like clouds, floating ice sheets fermenting with heat, nudged by Russian and Canadian icebreakers. Blankets of wildflowers; from the air, they throbbed, dark, lurid mauves, pulsating in waves of undulating colours, or sharp dandelion yellows.

After those years of adventures, he had gotten married and taken a job down South. If he had ever been Canadian, he had discarded that identity years ago, shuttling as he did between South Africa, his wife's country, the UK, and the Antarctic. A British passport had bought him a spell in the Army, when he had been deployed to Kuwait in the first Gulf War.

After he left the forces there was a stint as a commercial pilot flying 737s out of Edinburgh and Glasgow. He truly felt like a bus driver then; the job had been less about flying – the planes did it all for you these days anyway – and more about signing off manifests, calculating fuel payloads, paying his union dues and licences, cardiograms, eyesight tests, programming the airliner to pick itself up and put itself down, flying with a co-pilot whose name he often did not know and promptly forgot, to his embarassment, to Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen; this was his route, the dark channel of the North Sea, studded with increasinlgy twitchy oil rigs, siphoning the last of the North Sea oil from the seabed floor.

To all this, Nara had listened. He had felt the force of this young woman focussing on his life, and was flattered. Had he been so mistaken to think that listening of that calibre and intensity might itself be a kind of love?

That summer on the ferry flight to Canada he wrote to her all the way; every time they put the plane down he raced to find a computer, such had been his feeling of separation. She was down there – that was how he saw her, beneath him, underneath all of them, holding up the planet with her thin, girlish shoulders – trapped behind a wall called winter. Even while he was fending off mosquitoes and having ungainly conversations with his children about how school was going, as he refreshed his flying skills in a simulator at the aircraft manufacturer's headquarters, the sun blaring outside, bears lumbering through the forest, berries thickening, he would think of her in that barren place, the sky lacquered with cold stars, the steel dusk, and feel afraid for her.

For the first time in a long time, since his children were small, perhaps, he was afraid on behalf of someone else, afraid that he might never see her again, that some accident, some unforeseen occurrence (his licence not being renewed because of a bad result on his ECG, you never knew) would prevent him from returning to her. And he had felt another apprehension, far more difficult to define: that she would suffer in a way not of her own making, in a way she would not be able to escape from.

The black strip of the runway was in his sights now. He retracted the skis. It was near midnight but the sun glared, silver-orange, his constant beacon. How sweet it was, that he never saw winter, only migrated from the steepest curve of the northern hemisphere summer to the southern equivalent every season. What was that word? Heliotropic. It meant an animal or a flower that follows the sun. He was tuned to the earth's magnetic field to guide him up and down the planet, and like an Arctic tern he barely saw darkness. He had become, without meaning to, a creature of the light.

3

On the ship I decided to keep a diary, but found I could only write about the weather:

December 5th, 2016. We have been at sea now for three days.

Lead sky polished by sunbeams. Tobacco undersides of icebergs, stained with brown algae. Toothpaste mints: greens, blues. Sallow oyster sky on overcast days. Sky and sea, sky and sea, and the ice a mirror between them.

On our journey to the Antarctic, every day everything changed: the light, the sea, the birds who accompanied the ship, ecstatic to be given a free supper from the krill churned in our wake.

The forgetting started there, on the ship. The mind intent on avoiding pain is shy, elusive; one of those small slinking animals. Anything might set it off – the sight of a plum, a candle, skin of the same hue. A cold finger on my wrist, where my husband used to touch me, to get my attention. Not a loving gesture, more a controlling one – I never realised that at the time. Perhaps these memories wait for us, until we are in some careless endgame stage, and we can plunge into them again and again, as into a warm swimming pool, in the time before we die.