Victim of the Aurora

  Sir Eugene held up the tin I had retrieved from Forbes-Chalmers’ dump. He turned it in his hand as I had earlier in the day – as if to read its label. ‘We mustn’t seek him too keenly,’ he said. I suppose seek him too keenly was a bashful synonym for hunt him alive. ‘Not only because he may react with blows, but because it might drive him farther and farther up the slopes of Erebus where, no matter how successfully he has survived so far, he could not hope to out live a blizzard. All we can do is watch for him and, should he appear, call to him in as welcoming a way as we can. And if he runs, and we think we can catch him, call at least one friend and go in pursuit. But if we know he’s too far away to catch, let the poor man run. Let him run.’

  He sat and called for another cup of tea. I could see Barry across the table, making angry mouths over Sir Eugene’s coyness.

  As soon as the meal ended and while some of the sailors were still in his end of the hut, he went and spoke to Walter O’Reilly. Walter had rigged a device that told him when his bread was baked. It involved two terminals inside the oven attached to batteries outside. One terminal was fixed at the desired height for the loaf, the other rose on the crust. The two terminals united when the crust was high enough, and the bell rang.

  Now Barry wanted Walter to rig that device to a sled, then leave the sled outside the door. For if the garbage dump was any sign, Forbes-Chalmers needed a sled. Would there be a way, Barry asked, of making two terminals meet and ring a bell if Forbes-Chalmers tried to take a sled?

  Watching the conference, I felt a brief depression. I wondered would the crime, and Forbes-Chalmers, the elected criminal, yield to minor battery-operated mechanisms?

  I had been standing by the table in the end-of-dinner scrimmage. As everyone edged and squeezed to get to the location of their work or leisure, and while AB Stigworth already whisked at the floor beneath our feet with his broom, Alec took my elbow.

  ‘Sir Eugene,’ he said yet again. It was like a replay of the beginning of one of those sickening interviews of the past two days. And the alcove, and the suitcase. And Sir Eugene in his cardigan, taking me in with his bright wistful eyes. There was a difference tonight. Bernard Mulroy, AB Mulroy, storeman, stand-by cook, stood by the desk and, in the corner by the bed, stood his brother PO Percy Mulroy.

  When the curtain was again closed we were very crowded in there. Impishly I patted the bed beside me. ‘Care for a seat, Petty Officer?’ I asked the senior Mulroy.

  ‘No thank you, Mr Piers,’ he said.

  His young brother was ethereal, pre-Raphaelite, but Percy had the same features stamped more heavily on a broad, slightly brutal face.

  Sir Eugene promised the brothers they could trust Dr Dryden and Mr Piers. Elated with finding Forbes-Chalmers’s dump, I did feel – very nearly – trustworthy.

  ‘Now,’ Sir Eugene continued. ‘Now, AB Mulroy, you say you fed Forbes-Chalmers the puddings.’

  AB Bernard Mulroy looked solely at his clasped hands while he spoke. ‘I left them out for him at night.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mr Henneker asked me to.’ A lover’s favour, I thought.

  Sir Eugene shook his head, a little impatient with this piecemeal information. ‘Tell us everything,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Henneker told me he saw the man two nights running. The first night Mr Henneker sighted him down on the beach. Stumbling along, he told me, near the tide crack. It was while Mr Henneker was night watchman. Mr Henneker was so excited he decided to go night watchman twice in a row and I think Dr Warwick had been sick, so Mr Henneker stood Dr Warwick’s watch. Well, this time he saw him again. He says he saw him down at the dog lines and the man had a knife and looked like he was going to slaughter a dog and take it away for meat. So Mr Henneker yelled at the feller and of course the feller ran. Mr Henneker was very excited. He wanted to attract that man back but he didn’t want that man to go slaughtering dogs. Because Mr Henneker believed the dogs would be needed later, he didn’t much believe in tractors. Mr Henneker therefore asked me to leave food out there on clear nights. Anything I could come by, leave it out there near the dog lines. I used to wrap it up in little bits of sailcloth I found around the place. So I suppose I left food out there, in sight of the pony lines, about seven or eight times. It was no sense putting it out there if there was any snow at all because drift would just cover it. The last half-dozen times I left out food I saved from my own rations, because after I’d set out the puddings I didn’t want to take any more from the general store. It was better to go hungry myself.

  He looked a second at his brother, impassive in the corner. I recognized what the boy was doing, calling in his elder brother to correct or humiliate him, a cringe he had probably practised since babyhood. Percy Mulroy said nothing, so the young brother continued. ‘The truth is, Percy – PO Mulroy – caught me trying to nick some tinned beef for Mr Henneker’s visitor and he prevented me.’

  ‘I punished you,’ said PO Mulroy, mentally considering whatever the punishment had been and approving it all over again. ‘I punished you.’

  ‘Punished?’ asked Sir Eugene. ‘Punished your brother?’

  ‘The way, sir, a brother does punish a brother.’

  ‘What way is that?’

  ‘Chastisement, sir. I chastised my brother the way I have always chastised him.’

  ‘Do you mean beat your brother, PO Mulroy?’

  For the first time the story had made Sir Eugene angry. ‘Were you aware that no commissioned or non-commissioned officer has the right to strike a rating?’

  ‘Sir, I was obeying a higher authority so to speak.’

  ‘Who might that be, PO Mulroy? God?’

  ‘I was obeying my mother, sir.’

  ‘Your mother told you to beat up your brother?’

  ‘To look after him, sir. She got me to make a solemn promise. Look after him, she said.’ The memory made him talkative and he smiled a little, as if inviting us all to consider the quaint and amiable woman his mother had been. ‘She didn’t know how big the navy was. Or how hard it was for a brother on one of His Majesty’s vessels to look after a brother on another.’

  ‘By what logic, PO Mulroy, does look after become physical blows.’

  I knew Mulroy could have told Sir Eugene that in the Merseyside slums the brothers came from, the terms were synonymous. But Mulroy could sense he would not win this argument. His throat was red as if from the pressure of all the answers he had never been allowed to give.

  ‘It is not to happen again,’ Sir Eugene told him, as if fraternal punishment were the cause of the meeting.

  When the massive sledder was sent away there instantly seemed to be more air to breathe. Even Bernard Mulroy, the shamed rating, lifted his face a little towards us. I hated being there, part of the landscape of a humiliation he would remember all his life. For there was a shift of focus in the room now. Sir Eugene and Alec and myself all exhaled and took up a stance to consider the phenomenon before us. It must have been painful for the boy.

  ‘Tell me, Mulroy,’ Sir Eugene said quietly. ‘Were Victor Henneker and yourself friends?’

  ‘I suppose so, sir.’

  ‘In a way that most men are never friends with each other?’

  ‘I … yes, sir. Although it’s common enough on the lower deck, sir. That kind of friendship.’

  ‘Is that the truth?’ asked Sir Eugene. He did not want an answer. ‘Men treating other men,’ he went on, in a small voice, ‘as if they were women. Is that it?’

  ‘You … you could say so, sir.’

  ‘And your brother Percy knew about your friendship with Victor?’

  ‘It upset him more than anything. That’s why he talked Lieutenant Troy into choosing me as his storeman. Percy thought I’d be out of that kind of thing down here.’

  ‘I see.’ Sir Eugene looked at us with a half-smile. ‘The expedition had a purpose I was not aware of.’

  The boy did not answer.

  ‘Your brother beat you then. Would he have de
cided to beat up Mr Henneker?’

  ‘Oh no.’ The concept shocked AB Mulroy. ‘I was his brother like. He didn’t do that to gentlemen. Percy said he knew better than coming in here talking to Mr Henneker. In Percy’s eyes, it was my fault. He kept telling me I could stop it if I wanted. The friendship, I mean. And then it stopped anyhow.’

  ‘It stopped?’

  ‘Mr Henneker got … got sick of it.’ The boy began weeping. At the time and in innocence I thought, why it’s just like real love. ‘I couldn’t make the sort of conversation he was used to. If he told me a story about famous people, he had to explain what they were famous for. It used to make him angry.’

  Again I asked myself, do they really couple and split apart for the same reasons as men and women? My God! I thought. I had never been to the sort of school where older boys fell in love with younger ones. In my part of the country acts of bestiality, farmboys and heifers, featured dominantly in the sexual lore of my boyhood, and in ignorance I had considered that homosexuality was of the same level of aberration as those shocking barnyard acts.

  Meanwhile, Sir Eugene let the boy weep a while. I thought the Leader was doing better work with the younger Mulroy than with the elder. Though the idea of male love so appalled him that he could not utter the word, he had somehow caused Bernard Mulroy to talk about his affection for Henneker freely, from within a homosexual context.

  ‘You must have been upset when Mr Henneker stopped being your friend?’

  ‘For a day or so. But then Percy made such a fuss about being proud of me.’

  Alec, who in his surgery had obviously been presented with this problem by anxious parents, asked the question that was going begging. ‘Do you think Victor found another friend?’

  ‘Yes, someone he could talk with more,’ said Bernard flatly. There was a wealth of self-contempt in him.

  ‘In the sailors’ quarters? Or in the gentlemen’s?’

  ‘Someone in the gentlemen’s. A conversationalist, like.’

  Sir Eugene thanked him and told him he could go.

  Getting up, he nearly fell over. He must have been sitting stiff as a recruit in that chair. He went out sideways, to hide his stricken face from the gentlemen. No doubt he would go back to the sailors’ quarters by way of the stables, probably hiding in the sailors’ latrines until his face was composed.

  After AB Mulroy had gone, Sir Eugene motioned Alec to sit in his place. They did not speak for a long time. In the end Sir Eugene spoke softly.

  ‘Of course, it wasn’t the Mulroys who hurt Victor. They had no community of purpose. While Victor maintained the relationship with Bernard, Percy had cause to punish him but Bernard did not. When Victor terminated the relationship Bernard had cause but then it was Percy that didn’t …’

  I groaned from my place on the bed. I felt irrationally as if Sir Eugene had insulted the gift we had brought him that afternoon – the palpable refuse of Forbes-Chalmers.

  I said, ‘Please. We know what happened now. We don’t have to go on looking everywhere for motivations amongst ourselves.’

  Sir Eugene did his impassive thinking for a second, his eyes closed. No wonder, I thought at that time, Lady Stewart went looking for something more volatile. ‘No. It’s too big a leap. What you are doing is saying that because Forbes-Chalmers exists, as he does, he is mad, and because he is mad, he throttled Victor. There are gaps between all those propositions and naked hope, I’m afraid, Tony, will not span them.’

  I stared at him for his eyes had opened now. I thought he was being perverse. I looked at Alec.

  ‘Of course Sir Eugene’s right,’ said Alec.

  It annoyed me that they were both behaving like logic tutors, when I could tell with the pores of my skin that Forbes-Chalmers had finished Victor that crazy way.

  ‘We’ll bring you Forbes-Chalmers,’ I said. ‘We’ll find him and get his confidence and bring him here. And he can tell you himself.’

  ‘I hope you do, Tony,’ Sir Eugene assured me. ‘In the meantime we should consider who might be Victor’s new friend.’

  ‘These people,’ said Alec, meaning homosexuals, ‘move with amazing secrecy. I suppose that’s something the rest of society has enforced on them.’

  But none of us, not even Alec, had the expertise required for spotting new alliances of that nature.

  If you are to understand the egg journey and even the expedition in general, I shall have to draw you a few rough maps. You see, where we were – on Cape Frye in McMurdo Sound – was by definition an island called Ross Island after Sir James Clark Ross who discovered the sound some time in 1841.

  Here is the first rough map.

  The mountain marked 1 is Erebus. 2 is Terror, 3 is Bird. Both the latter are extinct volcanoes. 4 is Cape Crozier, where the Emperor Penguins hatch their eggs in the infernal cold. The cross-hatched area? Well, let us open up a little.

  The cross-hatched area is a great fixed bay of fast ice, fed continually by glaciers flowing from the high polar plateau. The glaciers are represented here as crude ladders, for the plateau is very high. The South Pole itself is 10,000 feet above the level of the sea and when, in my status as living fossil, the American navy flew me there ten years ago, I suffered severe nausea and giddiness from the altitude. I suppose I may have been suffering the shock too of reaching the Pole, that trigonometrical siren of the Edwardian age, to find it an ice-plain without character, staffed by disconsolate young sailors who would rather have been in Vietnam. In other words, the Pole was no longer a mythic place. That aside. The fixed bay of ice that welds Ross Island (and in the Cape Frye days welded us) to the great body of Antarctica is somewhat larger than France. The ice shelf was what those classic McMurdo Sound expeditions called it, and the name stuck. If you went to the Pole, you had to cross it, using manpower, dogs, ponies, and laying depôts as you went, depôts stocked with food and paraffin oil you could use on your way back. Sometimes hills and mountains (nunataks was the name explorers gave them, and who was I to argue?) stuck up out of the ice barrier, but mainly it was featureless and flat. Nonetheless, the winds cut ice waves in it, ridges running south-norm, so that it was sometimes hard to prevent sleds falling over side-ways as you travelled towards the glaciers and the Pole.

  The most direct glacier route from Cape Frye was up the Beardmore Glacier, marked more heavily than the others on my elegant map. Ice fall, ice Amazon, it figured in all the agonies of Shackleton and Scott and Stewart, and totally defeated Holbrooke.

  To return to the smaller enterprise of the egg journey. You can see that our route was around the back of Ross Island, across the hind slopes of Bird and Terror to the rookery. Only 82 miles. But crevassed with the ice rivers Bird and Terror themselves bred; with volcanoes on one side of us and the ice-shelf funnelling the sharper winds to us on the other. In a pitted valley where, against the wind and the wildly-seamed surface, we would have to be happy some days to make a mile and on others to sit, knees up, in our tent while all the ice accumulated in our clothing melted in the flesh-warmth of our sleeping bags; our skin climate itchy, clammy, enervating. And, hanging from the tent peak, our finnesköe would freeze as solidly as sculpture. In Antarctica now they would never let people hike eighty miles in mid-winter. If anyone moves, it is in a convoy of tracked vehicles. It is not that the present occupants are less tough than us. It is just that Antarctica is no longer a zone of crazy effort.

  It seemed to me that the hut had once again become a place Where ordinary committees could meet and compound the ordinary zaniness of their members.

  For example:

  ‘One thing I think we should do,’ said Paul, ‘I think we should cease washing our faces at least for four days before we leave. I mean, it will let our natural oils accumulate.’

  Alec Dryden, acting as chairman, nodded. ‘The others might find us hard to live with,’ he assented, ‘but no one else has ever been exposed to mid-winter wind for the length of time we intend. We need every coating …’

  ‘Pe
rhaps,’ I fatuously suggested, ‘we could sit over Warren Mead’s blubber stove in the stables. If we want coating …’

  ‘Excellent,’ Alec cried. ‘Blubber fat would be better still. You see, Tony, you only thought you were being whimsical.’

  ‘My God!’

  ‘We will all three of us spend at least an hour a day sitting over Warren’s blubber stove during the four days we don’t wash. Now, if there are no more questions …’

  Alec turned to the Admiralty map for the south side of the island. I watched Paul Gabriel’s eyes gleam as he took in its details. It was a map people he knew had created – Scott and Stewart during their respective first expeditions. As for the Admiralty, it considered the permanent ice-shelf to be part of the waves that Britannia ruled in those days.

  Alec pointed to the landmarks. First, Hut Point, a small peninsula miles down the sound. Scott had built a hut there in the summer of 1903–4, after working his ship farther along the sound than anyone else would manage to do until modern times. The hut he left was not much more favoured by us than was Holbrooke’s. Something happened to Antarctic huts once they were left, once the fires burned out. They never became seriously habitable again.

  At Pram Point we would turn the corner, drag the sleds on to the ice-shell and travel east to Cape Crozier. Fifteen miles from the corner, we would leave a small depôt. He thought we should make six miles a day on the way out, and eight on the way back. We would carry rations for four weeks though we would be back in three. Three hundred pounds of food. Ten gallons of paraffin weighing ten pounds per gallon.

  In the mornings it would take us as long as two hours, wearing wolf-skin mitts and being careful of sudden numbness in the extremities, to take down the tent and pack the sleds. One of us would be frost-bitten every morning, and was to be attended to instantly, delay or not. The area behind Ross Island was hectically crevassed, and therefore we would take two medium sleds and place half the rations, oil, and other gear on each. In that case if one sled went down a crevasse, we would still have the essentials to crawl back home with. We would also carry certain self-recording instruments which Waldo wanted us to leave at Cape Crozier – amongst the penguins – for retrieval the next summer.