Isvik Read online

  ‘Curiosity,’ Iain said. And he got to his feet. ‘Come on.’ He tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Time we got ourselves organised.’ He told Nils to have a seal meat stew, good and hot, waiting for us when we were ready to leave. ‘Some spuds, too. That’ll give us plenty of body warmth to go on with.’

  ‘Nei, beans is better. I put in plenty of beans for you.’

  ‘Ye dae that and we’ll be wind-propelled. Potatoes. Okay?’ He looked at me. ‘Everythin’ ye load on to yer sledge ye’ll have to pull. Just remember that, and what won’t go on the sledge goes on yer back. So keep it light.’ I asked how many days he reckoned and he shook his head. ‘How the hell dae Ah know? Depends on the ice. If we run into old pack that’s been layered, or a gaggle of bergs that have run amok …’ He gave an exaggerated, almost Gallic shrug. ‘Better load a prayer mat.’ He was trying to keep it light-hearted, but it was a warning all the same and I saw Iris watching him, her face tense.

  It was, in fact, beans, large butter beans Nils had soaked overnight. The spuds were beginning to shoot, he said. And there was treacle tart to follow. We left immediately afterwards. I remember Iris standing very still with her raven hair falling in wisps across her eyes, the full lips shut tight and an expression on her face that I can only describe as forlorn. Her eyes were fixed on Iain, and she didn’t speak. What she was thinking I can only guess – there were just the four of them left with the ship and I think she had come to rely very heavily on him.

  A wave of his hand and we were off, that casual salute his only farewell. He didn’t say anything, didn’t add to the instructions he had already written out for her, and he didn’t look back, not even briefly – just put his face to the tracks we would be following and trudged off, hauling his sledge behind him.

  I did look back. Iris was still standing there, quite still and staring after us, and behind her Isvik stood out very stark against the sun-sparkling light of the icy background, the water black around her. The Galvins watched us from the door of the wheelhouse, Go-Go’s scarlet anorak and trousers looking like an advertisement for some ice-cold Italian drink. Nils was nowhere to be seen and I couldn’t help feeling it was not a very strong party, two men and two women, to be left alone in such a remote, icebound part of the world, responsible for handling a largish vessel whatever the weather conditions.

  It was just after noon when we left, and six hours later we were still hauling in conditions that had become almost a whiteout. As a result the first we knew of open water ahead was a slight movement and bending of the ice. The tracks we were following went right to the edge of it. There was nothing for it but to inflate our rubber dinghy, load the sledges on to it and paddle across, a laborious exercise requiring two journeys. To add to our difficulties, the slight breeze that had been on our backs most of the way was getting stronger and producing little whitecaps on the water.

  Iain went first, and when he got back, he reported that the wind was drifting the light covering of snow and ice so that he had had difficulty picking up the tracks. By the time the two of us were safely across, with the second sledge and the remainder of the stores, the tracks were virtually obliterated, the surface of the pack drifting like icing sugar and making a strange, monotonous rustling sound.

  We got going again, pulling wearily. It was almost nine by then, the sun a blurred circle of opaque light reaching down towards the Ice Front. We were moving slower now, our feet dragging and the sledges seeming heavier, the harness cutting into our shoulders. The wind shifted gradually into the south-west, increasing in strength, the rustling surface of the ice drifting like white water round our boots, obliterating the tracks. Suddenly they were gone and we were hauling on a compass course, our heads down, earflaps buttoned tight and the sting of tiny ice crystals on our cheeks.

  It was a hailstorm that finally decided us to call a halt. Also we were moving into an area of old ice where there was a certain amount of layering and the going had become much harder. Even so, Iain was quite reluctant to pause, which was odd, thinking back to the moment when we had first discovered the snowmobile had gone, how remarkably laid-back he had been, almost as if he had had us pack the towing sledge as a bait for Ángel to take. ‘It’s that boy,’ he said, when I asked him about it. We were unpacking the Arctic sleeping bags from our sledges and I suddenly had a mental picture of the two of them in that bunk together.

  ‘Seems perfectly natural,’ I said. ‘In the circumstances.’

  ‘What circumstances?’ The words were snapped out, and he stood there, his thick waterproof sleeping bag in his hand, staring at me. And when I told him, he said, ‘Good God, man! Ye should’ve told me.’

  ‘Damn it!’ I said, ‘You could see Carlos worshipped the man – his behaviour, all his actions, right back to the way he followed Iris down to Greenwich and later into the Isle of Dogs.’

  He stared at me a moment longer, then he nodded. ‘Aye. Ye’re probably right. Ah should’ve remembered.’

  It was shortly after that, just as I was about to work my way into my bag, that he wanted to know if I knew anything about firearms. I asked him what sort – ‘I’ve done some wildfowl shooting. Why?’

  For answer he pulled a longish, plastic case from the unstrapped pile of stuff on his sledge. Out of it he slipped the dark gunmetal shape of a deadly looking weapon. ‘Ye may as well know how this thin’ works. Just in case.’

  ‘What is it, a Kalashnikov?’ I asked as he unfolded the skeletal metal butt and handed the thing to me. I had never handled a Kalashnikov. In fact, I had never handled any firearm more lethal than a shotgun. I could just read the maker’s name as he ran through the safety and firing mechanism for me. It wasn’t a Russian name, or English, or Italian. The name stamped into the metal was Heckler & Koch. ‘German?’

  He nodded.

  ‘How did you come by it?’

  ‘Ah saved up my petrol coupons.’ He grinned at me, then went on explaining how to handle it when firing. There was a single shot mechanism and it was fitted with a small telescopic sight. It was only later I learned, quite by chance, that the Heckler & Koch sub-machine-gun was a weapon favoured by the SAS. ‘Are you expecting Ángel to be armed?’ I was feeling suddenly chilled and a little tense. Shooting birds and rabbits was one thing …

  ‘Aye. He’ll be armed all right.’ And he added, ‘Also he’s haulin’ tae, possibly three of those cases of Semtex he brought on board with him.’

  I think that shocked me more than the thought that he might be armed. ‘You mean you loaded them on that sledge yesterday?’

  ‘’Course Ah didn’t load them. But as soon as we found he’d gone Ah checked the forepeak, where we had stored them, and tae of the cases were definitely missin’.’

  It was not a comfortable thought to go to sleep on, but I was so damned tired I fell asleep immediately, not even bothering to eat the bar of chocolate, nuts and raisins we had dug out of the stores. I woke once during the night, my face wet with snow. I shone a torch out into the twilight. The wind was blowing and it was snowing big, sticky flakes, so that all I could see was a moving curtain of white, and Iain, lying beside me, was just a snow-covered hump. It was very warm in my waterproof bag. I tucked my face down into it and fell asleep again immediately.

  I woke finally to a blindingly white world and a sun like a great blazing orange resting its lower rim on a crystal horizon, everything very clear, so clear in fact that I couldn’t gauge the distance off or the height of the bergs that seemed to litter the endless ice field ahead. I couldn’t even guess how far it was to the Ice Front to our left. It just stood there, a long wall of white blocking us off from the sight of anything further to the west.

  Iain was already out of his bag, sitting hunched on the untidy heap of his sledge. He had a little plastic compass in his hand and between his knees was a small radio. ‘You trying to get a forecast?’ I asked him.

  He shook his head, holding up his hand for quiet. He sat there for several minutes more, head bent, and listening
with great concentration as he made small adjustments to the position of the radio, periodically raising the compass to his eye and aligning it in the same direction. ‘Okay,’ he said finally, and put the radio carefully back in its case. ‘It’s fainter than it was last night, so Ah reck’n they’re already on the move. We’ll eat as we go.’

  We wore skis that morning and I was glad he had made me practise for a few minutes the previous day, for he set a fast pace. ‘We’ll start closin’ up on them soon. Those bergs will hold them up. The ice will be bad there. Could be the snowmobile won’t make it if he has to go through to the other side.’ He wanted to be much closer to them at that stage. ‘If they get behind the berg Ah may not be able to pick them up.’ Apparently he had fixed a homing limpet to the snowmobile and the little radio was a direction finder.

  All that day the sun shone and the bergs seemed to get no nearer. The snow clogged on the skis, the going hard. We tried snowshoes, but those were worse, and with the snow almost a foot deep, it was incredibly tiring to haul in just our boots. The bergs were flat-topped, obviously carved off the Ice Shelf, and judging by the jagged layering of the pack around them we presumed them to be grounded. ‘Shouldn’t be. We’re way off shore.’ And when I muttered that we still had the Ice Front in sight, he laughed and said, ‘That’s the ice cap pushin’ seaward. If those bergs are grounded, they’re on some sort of an underwater reef, the top of a submarine volcano even.’

  The fact that we were gradually able to make out more and more of their detail was the only indication we had that we were slowly getting nearer. The ice field around them was very broken as though the sea crashing against their massive bulks had suddenly frozen into solidity.

  We shed layers of clothing as we trudged, and time passed. It was quite hot when the sun reached its zenith, blazing straight in our faces. It was a day for dark goggles and white sun cream. I couldn’t see myself, but Iain looked like some crazy clown out of a comic movie. Every two hours we stopped for a breather and he checked the bearing of the tiny blips given but by the homing limpet. This was when we ate, quick snacks of concentrated food, an apple each, and on the march we sucked an occasional barley sugar.

  It was after our fourth stop that our line of march cut obliquely into the snowmobile’s tracks. They were sharp and clear, obviously made since the night’s snowfall, so that we were now only a few hours behind them. By then we were also very close to the first of the bergs, so close that suddenly we could see individual pebbles and boulders embedded in the ice, a yellowish band low down near the pack. There was a small polynya just to the east of it. A seal’s head surfaced in the centre and we realised that it was a blowhole and we were right on top of it. In the blinding white of the light our eyes played tricks.

  Nothing moved on the berg, or on the surface of the ice around it. We could see the twin line of the tracks passing to the west of it. The ice was flat there and relatively undisturbed, as though the berg had acted as a breakwater. All to the east it was a jumbled mass of layered chaos where wind and current had thrust the pack against the sheer wall-like side of the berg, certain proof that the solid mass of glacial ice was grounded.

  ‘Ye said ye had read what Sunderby wrote about the ship, his description of it.’ Iain was speaking to me over his shoulder. ‘Can ye remember whether he said anythin’ about bergs?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘At least I don’t recall a reference to icebergs. He wrote that there was something that looked like the figure of a man standing at the helm and the masts were all broken off short, just the stumps left. But I can’t recall that he made any reference to the ice around the vessel.’

  Iain had his glasses out and was searching the flat area on the shoreward side of the stranded mass of ice.

  ‘You’re thinking bergs like these might have acted as a breakwater, protecting the vessel from the moving pack, is that it?’

  ‘Aye. It’s the only explanation. The current runs northward up this side of the Weddell, and if the ship had been caught in the pack, it would have been carried up the coast, almost certainly smashed to pieces. It could be this group of bergs, or another further on that’s saved it.’ He put the glasses down. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter much. Our Ángel came lookin’ fur it in that aircraft he was testin’ and he found it. He knows, so we’ve only to follow him.’ He reached down, burrowing into the pile of gear on his sledge. ‘D’ye think his name is really Connor-Gómez?’ He came, out with a silver flask and held it up with the sort of smile a magician wears when he has accomplished a clever trick. ‘Ah thought per’aps a wee dram wouldna come amiss at this point.’ He took a swig, wiped the top of it with his hand and passed it across to me. ‘It’s the real malt – Glenmorangie.’

  It was smooth and warming. ‘Well, what’s in a name? But just suppose he’s not the lassie’s brother, but the product of that whore Rosalli Gabrielli and that pimp of hers, or perhaps some unknown, a one-night stand.’ He smiled. ‘Interestin’ thought, eh?’ And he added, suddenly leaning forward and stabbing his finger at me, ‘But a bloody sight more interestin’ is the thought of what the fuckin’ bastard has been up to with a ship and a pack of poor devils, Disappeareds from out of that ghastly huddle of old prison huts.’ He reached for the flask and swallowed another mouthful, then slipped it back into its place on the sledge. ‘Och, well, better get goin’ now. All will be revealed, eh?’ But he didn’t move for a moment, just stood there, staring towards the stranded iceberg, a shut, taut look on his face. ‘Ye remember, Iris’s brother was one of them – Eduardo.’

  ‘One of the Disappeareds, yes. Or do you mean …?’ I saw him nodding and I said, ‘In those huts, is that what you mean? I didn’t see his name there.’

  ‘No, ye weren’t lookin’ for what Ah was, or in the same place.’ And he added, ‘Ah knew what to look fur. A lot of prisoners write their names on the walls of their cells before they are taken out to die. I suppose they think it’s the only monument they’ll get, and man in his vanity likes to leave something for posterity.’

  ‘You say Eduardo Connor-Gómez’s name was there?’

  ‘Not his name, but …’ He leaned down, tightening the fastenings of his sledge: ‘Ah didn’t show it to ye. Ah didn’t want her to know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have told her.’

  ‘No, but she might have asked, and if she had, Ah was afraid she’d read the answer in yer face.’ He reached down with his dummy hand, picked up his sledge harness and began shrugging his massive shoulders into it. ‘If she had even guessed he had been on that ship, she’d have insisted on comin’ with us, and Ah didn’t want that. Yon man –’ He nodded to the north along the line of the tracks – ‘if ye can call him a man, more a devil, Ah think – if he thought she knew, he’d kill her. He’d kill anyone who discovered his secret.’ He broke his sledge out and began pulling.

  ‘Us?’ My mouth felt suddenly dry. ‘You mean he’d kill us?’

  ‘Why do ye think Ah brought that gun with me? Aye. If we find the ship, and there’s still evidence on board of what happened to the human cargo …’ He left it at that and we trudged on in silence, my thoughts running back over the whole sequence of events since he had ducked in through the door of the Cutty Sark’s saloon.

  We didn’t stop after that until we were abreast of the berg and could see the tramline marks of the snowmobile tracks running clear-cut across flat floe ice to the frozen chaos of what looked like a huddle of some five or six bergs. One of them was so long it stretched right across our line of march, out into the infinity of the Weddell Sea, where the flatness of its top merged with the pack. By then the sun was lipping the distant wall of the Ice Front, shadowing the face of it, so that it showed as a black line along the north-western horizon.

  Darkness came on the black wings of a storm cloud. We just managed to get our sleeping bags out and wriggle into them before it hit with a violent rush of wind that was suddenly full of hailstones the size of peas that drove at us almost horizontally a
nd poured along the ice with a rustling sound. It was as though the contents of a container full of ball-bearings were being flung across our cowering bodies, covering them in an armoured shroud.

  I don’t suppose the storm lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes, but it seemed to go on and on for ever. And when it did stop, it was as though a fairy godmother had waved a magic wand: there was sudden and absolute peace, not a sound anywhere, the stars showing bright in a shot-silk sky of deepening purple.

  My father, towards the end, became addicted to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He liked to read extracts of it aloud to anyone who would listen. It was natural for him in the circumstances of his illness, but for a kid of fifteen, which was all I was when he died, it was not exactly appropriate, dealing as it did with death and the meaning of life. However, there were times when the words stuck in my memory and one particular passage came back to me now.

  We had stopped where the surface of the ice was no longer flat, but had shattered and ridden up against the old shore ice in great jumbled slabs. The sun had vanished below the horizon, the sky beginning to cloud over again so that it was getting quite dark. We had placed our sleeping bags in the lee of one of the up-ended slabs of ice so that we were out of the wind, which was blowing from the north-west about force 4, enough at any rate to drift the surface snow in exposed places. We had with us a small spirit stove and it was after we had brewed up a mug of tea, very strong with a lot of sugar, and were drinking it – the first hot drink we had had since leaving Isvik … that I recited those two lines to Iain: ‘And that inverted bowl we call The Sky, Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die –’ hesitated, my memory failing me.

  ‘Fitz,’ he said. ‘Unmistakable.’

  ‘Something about it rolling inexorably on …’

  He shook his head, frowning. ‘Lift not thy hand … Aye, that’s it. Lift not thy hands to it for help –’ And then I took up the rest of it with him: ‘For it Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.’