It was late in the morning, the sun was up and shining heroically at a slant across the brilliant fjord, while Beard moved effortfully through the dimness of the boot room, trying to find his stuff. He was standing opposite peg number eighteen, on which, the day before, he knew this for a fact, he had hung his snowmobile suit. Directly below the peg was a wire basket where he had stowed his goggles, helmet and smaller items, and below that, under a slatted bench, was the compartment in which he had placed his boots. Even from down here, directly beneath the wheelhouse, he could hear the roar of many snowmobiles – getting them started in the morning was, apparently, an ordeal. A party of six, plus Jan armed with a rifle, was about to set off up the fjord to investigate the glacier. Five and the guide were already out on the ice, stamping their feet and flapping their arms to keep warm, and Beard as always was last. Someone had taken his gear, or some of it. His suit was not on its peg, his wire basket had been shoved along to position nineteen, only his boots – if they were his boots – were in the correct position. His undesirable cracked goggles were lying on the floor.
He took a suit – it was probably his anyway – from peg seventeen. It turned out to be at least two sizes too big, but once it was on he was not inclined to remove it. The boots, however, were a size too small. Among the smaller items in the basket only a glove liner was missing, and he made it up by taking a spare liner from number twenty-three, and promised himself to return it. The crack in his goggles no longer troubled him. He stepped out on deck to ironic applause from the group waiting below on the ice and, wanting to get in the spirit of group life, he made a bow. Even in his hurry, he had time to take in the scene from the top of the shallow ramp of the gangplank. There were many figures scattered on the ice around the ship. The helmets transformed the proportions of their heads, the snowmobile suits swelled their rumps, so that from a distance they resembled infants in a nursery playground. The choreographer and three friends were marking out her geometric dance; two figures were building what looked like a snowman or a statue; a lone person, probably Pickett, was rigging a microphone between two cones of ice; a person with a chainsaw was helping another, surely Jesus, load four ice blocks onto a sledge; someone was kneeling to polish a lens of ice a metre across. Another figure was going about in circles with a red flag and a whistle for the benefit of a movie camera on a tripod.
He had amazed himself by volunteering so soon for another snowmobile ride. Claustrophobia had driven him out, and the tawny light across the fjord as seen from the mess windows, and the fact that it was not permitted to go anywhere without a guide and his gun. He sat astride the last machine and the group set off in single file across the ice in an easterly direction, deeper into the fjord. It should have been fun, to be skimming down a wide corridor of ice and snow, with mountains rising sheer on both sides. But once again, the wind cut through every layer, the cracked goggles fogged up and froze within minutes and Beard could make out no more than a greyish blob of the machine in front. He was directly in the wash of six exhausts. For ten kilometres Jan kept up a wild speed. Where the winds had stripped the snow away, the surface of the fjord was like ridged iron and the snowmobiles rattled and bucked.
Twenty minutes later they were standing in sudden silence a hundred metres from the glacier’s terminus, a broken blue wall that stretched for fifteen kilometres across the valley. The impression was of a ruined city, grubby and dissolute, with rubble, broken towers and giant fissures. At minus twenty-eight, it was too cold today, Jan explained, for displays of ice shearing away in the cause of polar warming. They passed an hour taking photographs and walking up and down. Then someone saw a print in the snow. They huddled round it, and stepped back to allow their guide, whose rifle was over his shoulder, to display his expertise. A polar bear’s print, of course, and very new. The snow was thin where they stood, and it was not easy to find another impression. Jan used his binoculars to scan the horizon.
‘Ah,’ he said quietly. ‘I think we leave now.’
He pointed and at first they saw nothing. But when it moved, it was clear enough. At a distance of a mile or so, a bear was ambling towards them.
‘He’s hungry,’ Jan said forgivingly. ‘Time for skidoos.’
Even with the prospect of being eaten alive, dignity prevailed and they only half ran to the machines. As he reached his, Beard knew what to expect. Everything about this trip had conspired to reduce him. Why would his luck change now? He pushed the button. Nothing. Fine. So let his sinews be stripped from his bones. He tried again, then again. Around him, clouds of blue smoke, and high-pitched roars, the proper expression at last of full-throated panic. Already, half the party was shooting away in the direction of the ship. It was every-man-for-himself. Beard wasted no energy cursing. He pulled out the choke lever, though he knew it was a mistake, for the engine was still warm. He tried again. And again, nothing. He smelled petrol. He had flooded the engine and he deserved to die. Now all the others had gone, along with the guide, whose dereliction of duty Beard resolved to report to Pickett, or the King of Norway. His agitation was steaming up his goggles, and, as usual, the steam froze. Pointless then, to look back, but he did it all the same, and saw frozen steam fringed with a glimpse of the fjord’s ice. It was reasonable to assume the bear was still coming, but he had clearly underestimated its speed over the ground, because at that moment his shoulder was struck a heavy blow.
Rather than turn and have his face ripped away, he hunched his shoulders in expectation of the worst. His last thought – that in his carelessly unchanged will he had left everything to Patrice for Tarpin’s use – would have been a dismal one, but what he heard was the guide’s voice.
‘Let me do it.’
The Nobel laureate had been pressing the headlight switch. The machine came to life at first touch.
‘Go,’ Jan said. ‘I’m behind you.’
Despite the danger he was in, Beard glanced back again, hoping to catch sight, for anecdote’s sake, of the animal he was about to outpace. In the narrow perimeter of semi-clarity that surrounded the goggle’s frozen fog patch there was movement, but it may have been the guide’s hand or a corner of his own balaclava. In the account he would give for the rest of his life, the one that became his true memory, a polar bear with open jaws was twenty metres distant and running at him when his snowmobile started forward, not because, or not only because, he was a liar, but because he instinctively knew it was wrong to dishonour a good story.
Racing away across the rackety ice, he gave out a whoop of joy that was lost to the icy hurricane in his face. How liberating to discover in the modern age that he, a city-dweller, an indoors man who lived by the keyboard and screen, could be tracked and ravaged and be an entire meal, a source of nourishment to others.
Perhaps that was the best moment of his week. They were back at their base within minutes, it seemed. Already, at one forty-five, there was a deeper chill in the air, and orange evening light illuminated the few artists who had not yet retreated into the ship. His groin was so tender that he waited until the others had gone inside, then he walked backwards up the gangplank. It hurt less that way. He paused in the entrance of the boot room, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the poor light, and soon it was clear enough – someone had hung all his stuff at Beard’s station. In a constructive spirit, he removed the lot, boots and all, to a vacant spot in a corner. When he took off his woollen balaclava, it slipped to the floor with a clunk and seemed to stare up at him in open-mouthed disbelief. What was he doing here? He put his gear away, then he went to the mess room, said a round of hellos to the half-dozen people there, and took a hot drink to his cabin and lay on the bunk.
It was an accident of cartography that placed the South Pole under the North, but he could not dispel the impression that he was near the top of the world and that everybody else, Patrice included, was below him. He had an overview then, and they became a feature of his week, these afternoons in the Arctic dusk, when he reminded himself over the cocoa that his life was about
to empty out and that he must begin again, take himself in hand, lose weight, get fit, live in a simple, organised style. And get serious at last about work, though he had no idea what work he could do that was not detached from or eased by his peculiar fame. Must he give forever the same lecture series about his one small contribution, sit on committees, be a Presence? He had no answers, but the musing was comforting and often he fell asleep in the darkness of three o’clock and woke hungry, with renewed appetite for the vin de pays.
After his deliverance from the jaws of a polar bear, he did nothing adventurous all week. Bolder types went off with a guide to hike in the mountains, or make a snow cave, or explored on snowmobiles a steep valley that rose through rocky outcrops on the far side of the fjord. Each day he spent two or three hours outside the ship, pottering about with the others. He was taken on as an assistant, holding an end of a piece of string, cutting blocks of ice for Jesus, helping with Pickett’s microphones, joining in the dance. This involved being filmed walking in single file at a measured pace behind a dozen others for two hundred yards in a straight line, before making a right-angled turn and walking the same distance before the next turn. It was soothing, he was content to think of nothing and be told what to do. In a warmer climate, with better health, he might have tried his chances with the choreographer, slender Elodie, from Montpellier, especially if she had come away without her husband, a bullet-headed photographer who had once played rugby for France. Stella Polkinghorne also had a husband – the convenor, Barry Pickett.
Beard’s life, then, was simplified. Caring little for art or climate change, and even less for art about climate change, he kept his thoughts to himself and was affable, and was surprised to find himself faintly popular. His mind emptied as he went about the ice on his errands. One lunchtime he carried out from the ship cups of tomato soup, which froze as he reached the bottom of the gangplank. They were incorporated into a sculpture. His spirits rose, or ceased to sink. He thought about his fitness again. Only ten or twelve years before, he had played a plausible game of tennis, compensating for his height with a vicious, stabbing little forehand volley at the net. And he had once skied with near competence. Eight years ago he could still touch his toes. Surely, it was not inevitable that he should get heavier by the month until he dropped dead? He arranged to take a daily hike on the fjord, a two-mile circuit around the ship, escorted by Jan carrying a gun. After the second excursion, lying on his bunk in the afternoon with aching legs, he made a mental list of the food he would no longer touch. He was fifteen pounds overweight. Act now, or die early. He swore off all the usual things – dairy produce, red meat, fried food, cakes, salted nuts. And crisps, for which he had a particular weakness. There were other items, but he was asleep before the list was complete. During the last three days of his stay he kept to the new regime.
From the second day, the disorder in the boot room was noticeable, even to Beard. He suspected that he never wore the same boots on consecutive days. Even though he wrapped his goggles (these ones were undamaged) in his inner balaclava on the third day, they were gone by the fourth, and the balaclava was on the floor, soaking up water. That morning he saw several snowmobile suits, also on the floor. They had a trampled appearance, and he decided, without looking too closely, that none could be his. Pickett admitted to him, while they were out recording the sound of the wind in the ship’s rigging, that for two days he had been wearing two left boots. But he was a hardy sort who did not seem to mind. Beard did mind. He was not a communally-spirited person, but there were certain decencies he took for granted – in himself, and therefore in others. He always put his stuff on and below the same peg, number seventeen, and was disappointed to note that others had trouble observing such simple procedures. Gloves were a particular problem, for it was impossible to go outside without them. As a precaution, he stuffed his inside his boots, along with the glove liners. The next day the boots were gone.
He liked the evenings. By the time they started gathering in the mess room before dinner, it had been dark for five hours. There was two hours’ drinking before the first course. The wine was from a neglected region of Libya. He generally started on the white, drank the red until he sickened and returned to the white, and there was generally enough time to switch back before bedtime. After dinner, there was, of course, only one topic. Mostly, Beard listened. Never before had he encountered idealists in such concentration and he was by turns intrigued, embarrassed, constrained. When Pickett asked him on the third night to talk about his work, he stood up to speak. He described the Centre and the quadruple-helix rooftop wind turbine, plausibly claiming it as his own initiative. It was a revolutionary design, he told the room, and he made a sketch to be passed around. It would cut household bills by eighty-five per cent, a saving that would be the equivalent of building – not quite drunk, he summoned a number – twenty-three medium-sized power stations. There were respectful questions, and he answered them judiciously, lucidly. He was among scientific illiterates and could have said anything. There was an impassioned statement of support from Stella Polkinghorne. She said that Beard was the only one here doing something ‘real’, at which the whole room warmed to him and applauded loudly. He had never cared much what others thought, but now – how lowering – he was touched and could not conceal it, to be, for just a few minutes, the darling of the ship.
Otherwise, he listened and drank. After two or three glasses of the white, the red went down painlessly, like water, at least at first. There were themes – some were canonic and chased each other crazily, others were fugal and ran concurrently, as disappointment did with bitterness: the century had ended and climate change remained a marginal concern, Bush had torn up Clinton’s modest proposals, the United States would turn its back on Kyoto, Blair showed no grip on the subject, the long-ago hopes of Rio were lost. Canonically pursuing then overtaking disappointment was alarm. The Gulf Stream would vanish, Europeans would freeze to death in their beds, the Amazon would be a desert, some continents would catch fire, others would drown, and by 2085 the Arctic summer ice would be gone and the polar bears with it. Beard had heard these predictions before and believed none of them. And if he had, he would not have been alarmed. A childless man of a certain age at the end of his fifth marriage could afford a touch of nihilism. The earth could do without Patrice and Michael Beard. And if it shrugged off all the other humans, the biosphere would soldier on, and in a mere ten million years teem with strange new forms, perhaps none of them clever in an apeish way. Then who would regret that no one remembered Shakespeare, Bach, Einstein, or the Beard–Einstein Conflation?
While dark and even greater cold enveloped the ship in the lonely frozen fjord, and the brave yellow gleam from its portholes was the only light, the only sign of life for a hundred miles across the crackling icy wastes, other themes flourished symphonically: what was to be done, what treaties were to be made between the quarrelsome nations, what concessions, what gifts should the rich world self-interestedly make to the poor? In the mess room’s humid after-dinner warmth, it seemed to the owners of full stomachs sealed with wine that it was only reason that could prevail against short-term interests and greed, only rationality could draw, by way of warning, the indistinct cartoon of a calamitous future in which all must bake, shiver or drown.
The statehood-and-treaty talk was worldly in comparison with another leitmotiv that summoned a cooling measure of austere plainsong, a puritanical air from the old conservation days, distrustful of technological fixes, determined that what was required was a different way of life for everyone, a lighter tread on the precious filigree of ecosystems, a near-religious regard for new rules of human fulfilment in order to flourish beyond supermarkets, airports, concrete, traffic, even power stations – a minority view, but heard with guilty respect by all who had steered a stinking snowmobile across the pristine land.
Listening, as he usually did, with Jesus at his side from their corner of the mess room, Beard interjected only once, on the last eveni
ng when a gangling novelist called Meredith, appearing to forget there was a physicist present, said that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which stipulated that the more one knew of a particle’s position, the less one knew of its velocity, and vice versa, encapsulated for our time the loss of a ‘moral compass’, the difficulty of absolute judgements. Beard was peevish in his interruption. It was worthwhile to be correct, he told this crop-haired fellow with rimless glasses. What was at issue was not velocity but momentum, in other words, mass times velocity. At such hair-splitting there were muted groans. Beard said that the principle had no application to the moral sphere. On the contrary, quantum mechanics was a superb predictor of the statistical probability of physical states. The novelist blushed but would not give way. Did he not know who he was talking to? Fine, yes, OK, statistical probability, he insisted, but that was not certainty. And Beard, just finishing his eighth glass of wine and feeling nose and upper lip elevate in contempt for an ignorant trespasser on his field, said loudly that the principle was not incompatible with knowing precisely the state of, say, a photon, so long as one could observe it repeatedly. The analogy in the moral sphere might be to re-examine a moral problem a number of times before arriving at a conclusion. But this was the point – Heisenberg’s Principle would only have application if the sum of right plus wrong divided by the square root of two had any meaning.
The silence in the room was not so much stunned as embarrassed. Meredith stared helplessly as Beard brought his fist down hard on the table. ‘So come on. Tell me. Let’s hear you apply Heisenberg to ethics. Right plus wrong over the square root of two. What the hell does it mean? Nothing!’
Barry Pickett intervened to move the discussion on.
That was an isolated discordant note. What was memorable and surprising came every evening, usually late on, in the bright tones of a marching brass band, or the sound of massed voices in unison, elated in common purpose and obliterating for a while all disappointment, all bitterness. Beard would not have believed it possible that he would be in a room drinking with so many seized by the same particular assumption, that it was art in its highest forms, poetry, sculpture, dance, abstract music, conceptual art, that would lift climate change as a subject, gild it, palpate it, reveal all the horror and lost beauty and awesome threat, and inspire the public to take thought, take action, or demand it of others. He sat in silent wonder. Idealism was so alien to his nature that he could not raise an objection. He was in new territory, among a friendly tribe of exotics. Those sentinel snowmen guarding the foot of the gangplank, the recorded sound of the wind moaning through the rigging, the disc of polished ice that refracted the day-long setting sun, Jesus’s penguins, thirty of them, and three polar bears, marching along the ice beyond the ship’s bow, the harsh, impenetrable fragment of a novel punctuated with expletives that Meredith read, or shouted, aloud one evening – all these demonstrations, like prayers, like totem-pole dances, were fashioned to deflect the course of a catastrophe.