Isvik Page 28

You would expect a man losing face like that to cover it up with a show of anger, at least retreat into his shell. But not Ángel. He got up off the deck with a quick, lithe movement. ‘Some girl, that!’ He winked at me, then walked away with his head held high and a little smile on his face as though he’d enjoyed the experience of being thrown on his back. And that night, at dinner, he seemed as easy and charming as ever. It was Go-Go who sat silent and watchful, a sulky, withdrawn look on her face.

  It should have been a happy occasion, for at sunset, with no wind and surrounded by ice, the sea so still the surface of it looked like burnished pewter, we moored Isvik to a floe and went below. It was the first time since Ushuaia we had all sat down together for the evening meal. Nils had opened a bottle of red Chilean wine, but even that did not lift the brooding tenseness that hung over the table. At the time I put it down to the realisation that we were nearing the point at which we would have to take to the ice, might even be beset and locked in for the winter. But in retrospect I think it went much deeper than just a matter of nerves. Each of us had our own personal and very different reasons for being seated there at that table in the quiet of the saloon on a ship moored in the midst of a world of ice.

  We were like the cast in some strange theatrical drama, sitting silent at that table listening to the sound of the sea sucking at the ice floes, grinding them together as the current shifted them, and conscious all the time of something waiting in the wings. There was little or no conversation, all of us, including Nils, seeming to be locked in on our own thoughts. Go-Go and Andy had their own personal problems. I had already come to the conclusion that he was tiring of her. She was, I guessed, sexually very demanding. He often looked washed out, or as Iain put it more crudely, ‘The laddie’s clapped out, so ye just watch him.’ And he had added, ‘Also he’s scared, and so is she.’

  By now we all knew that she had only come because she couldn’t bear to let him go on his own. She was desperately in love with him, and he was for ever trying to escape into a world of his own, the world of air waves and disembodied voices that made no demands on him. And Ángel, looking at her hungrily across the table, smiling a relaxed smile, while Carlos watched, his eyes eager and full of jealousy. Periodically I glanced across at Iain. Iris was sitting beside him, her eyes on her plate, both of them silent. And when she got up to get him a second helping of seal meat and rice, I found myself looking right through the scarlet of her polo-necked sweater and navy-blue trousers, imagining her as she had been when she rolled over and I had found myself looking down on her naked body sprawled on the deck below me. Christ! It made me ache for the feel of her.

  ‘Make certain, Pete, ye get an accurate fix tonight.’ Iain smiled at me and I had a feeling he knew exactly what had been in my thoughts. Later, as we stood together in the wheelhouse, he said, ‘Women are the devil on board ship.’ He was jotting down chronometer times and angles as I took the star sights and called out the sextant readings to him. ‘Aye, but it’s not for very much longer.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ There had been a note of finality in his voice.

  ‘Ye’ll see. Soon as we reach the Ice Shelf and get to the point where our progress along it is blocked …’ He left it at that, and in the small hours, as the light increased with dramatic suddenness at the imminence of sunrise, our windspeed indicator at the mainmast top began to spin with a nice little breeze from the north-east, so that Andy and I were able to get the ship under way again.

  Ángel should have been on watch by then. I left Andy at the wheel and went down to rout him out. He was always doing that, lying in and waiting for the watch on duty to call him. His bunk was on the port side aft and the door across the cubbyhole that did for a cabin was slid to. I flung it back, annoyed at having to come down to call him when he had a perfectly good alarm clock and I had sounded the change of watch on the ship’s bell. ‘Time you were on watch,’ I told him, and I shone the beam of the powerful deck torch I had with me full on him. His face was turned away from me, only the back of his head visible. I stood there, staring, for there were two heads on the pillow and it was Carlos who slowly turned and looked up at me, smiling softly like a cat that’s been at the cream.

  Abruptly Ángel flung the duvet top of his sleeping bag back and swung his legs across Carlos, reaching with his feet for the floor. They were both of them naked and I swear the boy winked at me, that little devil peeping up at me from out of moist, slightly pink-looking eyes. I cut the beam of my torch and left them in darkness, feeling oddly shocked, which was silly of me really since I knew very well Carlos was a homosexual. But it’s one thing to guess at somebody’s sexual appetite, quite another to see him practising it. And with Ángel, who was just old enough to be his father. Christ almighty! The thought was there in my mind, quite suddenly, quite unbidden.

  There was, of course, no indication of anything untoward when Ángel came into the wheelhouse fully clothed and took the helm, repeating the course Andy gave him in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice.

  It was a pity I didn’t have the satellite pictures I was shown later by one of the Met. officers at Mount Pleasant. They were basically weather maps, and it was possible, when the cloud was thin, to see the extent of the pack ice, even the degree to which it had degraded into brash. Some of the bigger bergs, too, that had carved off the Ice Shelf – I was told there was one over seventy miles in length, a 1986 Landsat picture showing some thirteen thousand square kilometres floated off, the Belgrano base gone and the Filchner with a new front where the great Chasm had been. But the weather maps did show the darker patches at the base of the Weddell Sea that meant open water. These were quite large in the east, but gradually thinned out towards the west till, beyond the Filchner, they were little more than an intermittent thread of dark at the eastern end of the Ronne Ice Shelf.

  Had we had one of those satellite weather maps on board we might have found the nerve to push on through the dangerously narrow leads to the next open water patch and even beyond. As it was, having sighted the Ronne Ice Shelf on the 21st through flurries of snow, and sailed right up to the sheer front of it the following day, we hesitated about pushing our luck much further. The open water was gradually thinning. Soon we were motoring through thread-like passages no wider than twenty feet, with the distant Ice Front gleaming white like chalk cliffs in the crystal sunlight on our port side and bergs of all shapes and sizes huddled in fascinating, sun-eroded shapes to starb’d. We could see bits of the Ice Front carving off in great chunks, rolling and tumbling into the water and tossing us about in the waves it created, and whenever we were in broader waters there were always growlers and bergy-bits to contend with, so that we gradually became exhausted with poling off to keep the bows clear of the much larger expanses of ice hidden beneath the surface.

  We got as far west as 61° 42″ before being stopped by a tabular berg that looked as though it had broken away from the Ice Front quite recently. Between it and the Front the pack had layered, great up-ended shelves of ice lying higgledy-piggledy. It was no place to venture, we thought, even though there was a slender line of dark water stretching away north that looked as though it might lead round the berg and out again into the flat ice prairie of the pack.

  We dared not risk it, and so we laid out four mooring lines with grapnels on the ends to the surrounding floes and shut down the engine, relying on wind power, of which there was then plenty coming straight off the Ice Shelf, to keep our batteries fully charged. That was on the 25th and Andy managed to get a weather forecast from the Polarstern, or maybe it was from the BAS base at Halley, I’m not sure which. The outlook was fairly good for the next few days with winds from south veering through west to north-west. Strange, but I still found it difficult to accept that the Coriolus effect makes a veering wind in the southern hemisphere indicative of low pressure conditions, causing them to vortex clockwise, not anti-clockwise as would be the case north of the equator. Most of my previous navigational experience being in northern waters, my instinc
t was to regard wind shifts that followed the clock as blowing from out of a high pressure system.

  ‘Well?’ Iain was standing in the wheelhouse facing Ángel who had come up to listen in on Andy’s conversation with the Halley people. ‘How far is it? We’re west now of the 192 degree bearin’ ye gave us way back. How many miles d’ye reck’n we got to trek across the ice?’

  ‘Not far now,’ Ángel replied.

  ‘How many miles? That’s what Ah asked ye.’

  Ángel shrugged. ‘You know as well as I do that the ice here is shifting northward all the time on the current. I know where I saw the ship. I have the co-ordinates and we are now very close. But how many miles she has drifted …’ Another shrug of those square, well-proportioned shoulders. ‘How fast is the current – 0.5, 0.75, 1 knot? You tell me, then I tell you where is your ship.’

  Iris had joined us and she started to insist on an answer, but Iain put his hand on her arm and said, ‘We’ll discuss it tomorrow. It’s late now.’ The hands of the chronometer stood at six minutes past midnight. It was already 26 January.

  Next day dawned bright and very still, no wind at all, which enabled us to take the ship over to the north side of the polynya and moor alongside a floe that was secured to the remains of an old berg. We then rigged a block and tackle to the mainmast yard and hoisted out the snowmobile. Iris, who had spent some months in northern Canada, insisted on calling it a skidoo. After swinging it across on to the ice, we rigged a small cargo net, loaded it full of all the stores and gear we needed and swung that over on to the ice. The outboard for the semi-rigid inflatable started up almost immediately we pulled the cord, but the snowmobile, despite being cocooned in heavy-duty plastic sheeting, appeared to have got water in the engine. It refused to give even the slightest cough. In the end Nils began stripping it down, but long before he had cleaned it thoroughly and checked the fuel lines a hand-chilling wind had come in from the south, and by the time he had got it assembled again it was blowing a good force 6.

  The temperature drop was considerable and he had some difficulty in putting the engine together again. Still it would not start. There was more water in the carburettor. We knew what the answer was then. Why we hadn’t examined the tank in the first place I cannot think. Doubtless we were tired. We were also excited, anxious to get everything ready in the shortest possible time.

  The tank had water in it and I thought of Carlos lashing out with that ice axe. I jumped back on board, checked the drum from which we had filled up. ‘You bloody, stupid little fool,’ I yelled at him. ‘You did that.’ I was pointing to a round, jagged little hole I had found near the top, half-concealed by the rope securing the drum to the bulwarks. He shook his head, glancing quickly at the others, who were all standing round in an accusing semi-circle staring at him. ‘I didn’t …’ I think he had been intending to deny it again, but his voice faltered and in the end he said, ‘I w-was not m-meaning to make any damage. It was not – not intentional.’

  By the time Nils had thoroughly cleaned out the snowmobile’s tank and refilled it from a different drum, and I had dismantled the fuel line and thoroughly cleaned the carburettor again, the wind chill had seeped through to our bones and we were shivering with cold. But the fact that the engine started at the first pull of the cord cheered us, and just to make sure everything was all right, we hitched the loaded sledge to the snowmobile and gave the machine a test drive of a few hundred metres under load, each of us taking a turn at driving it.

  The floe ice here was flat, so there was nothing difficult about it, but Go-Go stayed on board. She was preparing lunch, she said, and Andy was in the wheelhouse. The snowmobile had been adapted for travelling on water, so that it was our recce vehicle as well as our sledge-puller. If that hadn’t worked we would have had to use the smaller sledges which we put together that afternoon, just in case. There were two of them and a second inflatable, all rubber, which we got out of its pack, testing it out in the water between the ship and the floe.

  Just before noon it started to snow, hard, driving stuff that was more like hail and hit one’s face hard as bird shot. We went back on board where Go-Go had pasta and a pot of piping hot seal stew waiting to thaw us out. Slowly the snowmobile, with its attendant sledges all packed with gear, were transformed into white mounds that merged with the background. Seen dimly through the driving white of that mini-blizzard, they made a wretched tableau, reminding me of Scott and all the difficulties Shackleton had faced. I was no Worsley, and the prospect of being lost in a whiteout, and having to find my way back, filled me with dread. The ship, buried in snow and ice, would present such a very small target in the vast wastes of Antarctica.

  But then the snow stopped and the wind died as quickly as it had got up. Suddenly the sun was shining and it was warm again. We took the stores off the towing sledge, wrapped them in tough woven polyethylene plastic sheeting and strapped them on to the sledge again. Then we slid the whole clumsy-looking package into the water. To my surprise, I must admit, we had got the weight right; it floated. We hitched the ungainly contraption to the snowmobile and towed it back and forth several times across the polynya, then unpacked it and erected the small tent, a dry run for the ice trek ahead. Everything inside the plastic was dry. No water had got in, though in the last run Iain had driven the snowmobile at full throttle.

  We were ready to go then. Iain would accompany Ángel. That was the plan. I would be in charge of the ship in his absence. In the event of difficulties, or any disaster, he had a VHF set with a fully-charged battery on the snowmobile. I would be in command of any relief party.

  Iris, of course, wanted to go with the two ship-seekers. But no, Iain wouldn’t agree to that. ‘If ye have to come after us,’ he said, turning to me, ‘Iris, as expedition leader, will have to take charge of the ship. Andy stays on board. He’s needed to man the radio. Nils, too. Ye’ll need him to handle the engine,’ he told Iris. And then to me again, ‘That leaves Carlos. If we dae get into difficulties, then it’s ye and Carlos to come to our aid, and make sure ye’re able to maintain contact with the ship at all times. There’s tae spare VHF sets, and across the pack they should have a range of anythin’ up to a hundred miles, that is, so long as ye’re not tucked in behind a berg.’

  Iris tried to argue with him, but in the end she gave up. I think she realised that, however determined she was, the two men would still travel faster on their own. Everybody turned in early that night. The forecast was good and the starting time was fixed for shortly after first light. I set my alarm for 03.00 sun time. Breakfast would be at 03.30 and DV the start time was fixed for 04.30. For navigational purposes our chronometer, and my own quartz digital wristwatch, were on GMT, or Zulu time, a difference of over four hours since we were over 60 degrees west of the Greenwich Meridian.

  I woke once, hearing movement and the sound of voices. That was at 01.17, but I thought nothing of it and turned over and went to sleep again. In a boat like Isvik, with its semi-open plan, there was always somebody moving around. The ice was creaking and there were the usual ship noises as she strained at her mooring ropes, shifting to the lift and roll of the slight swell.

  My alarm went off at 03.00 and I slid out of my bunk into a raw, cold draught from the wheelhouse. Somebody must have left the door to the deck open. I was struggling into my fur-lined boots when I heard Iris’s voice and the sound of feet on the deck above. ‘What’s that ye’re sayin?’ It was Iain’s voice, much fainter, and then he laughed. ‘What the hell did ye expect?’

  I grabbed my anorak and went up into the dawn. The sky was shot with cloud, the sun painting it a virulent orange. Iain and Iris were out on the ice and the snowmobile was gone, the big sledge too. The twin lines of their going, imprinted on the flat white surface of the floe, ran away to the north-west. ‘Don’t worry,’ Iain said to her. ‘He’ll not lose us.’

  It was Ángel, of course, and I would have expected Iain to be furious that the man had gone off with our only powered ice transport a
nd a sledge piled with stores. Instead, he seemed quite relaxed about it, even smiling slightly as he turned his head and saw me. ‘Have a look, will ye, and see if Carlos is in his cabin.’

  When I returned to the wheelhouse he and Iris were back on board and the Galvins were on deck. I told him, not only were both cabins empty, but they had taken most of their cold weather clothing with them, also skis, snowshoes, glasses and camera.

  ‘Carlos is with him then.’

  I nodded.

  ‘The little fool!’ Iain shook his head. ‘Ah’m sorry about that. The boy could be in trouble.’

  He took Iris’s arm and the two of them came in out of the cold, sliding the door to behind them. ‘We’ll have breakfast now, then we’ll load up the two small sledges. Soon as that’s done, Pete and Ah will get goin’.’ He said this to Iris. I think he was expecting her to continue the argument she had started the previous day, insisting that she should go with him, not me. There was a sudden tightness about her mouth, her eyes narrowing under a frown. But she didn’t say anything, merely turned away and went below.

  Now we were in colder regions we were having porridge in the morning. It was warm and comforting. I was thinking there wouldn’t be much in the way of comfort as we ploughed our way north parallel to the line of the Ronne Ice Front, each of us hauling a sledge. ‘You were expecting it, weren’t you?’ I said as I passed Iain a steaming mug of coffee.

  ‘Expectin’ what?’ he almost growled, burying his face in the mug. For some reason he didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘That he’d steal a march on us.’

  And when he still didn’t say anything, I added, ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes, why?’ Iris echoed. ‘Why would he be so anxious to find the ship?’

  He banged his mug down, starting to get up, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer that.

  Andy nodded. ‘That’s something I’ve been curious about ever since Go-Go and I joined ship. What’s the magnet that’s pulling you all?’