‘Please stop this,’ Lars said in the dark, across the chasm that their marriage bed had become.
Ingrid stayed still, facing away from him.
He sighed heavily. ‘I know you’re awake.’ His hand reached across the sheets towards her.
She drew away from him. ‘I don’t want another child.’
‘Can we at least discuss it?’
‘No.’
Lars threw back the blankets. ‘God! You could drive a man to desperate acts.’
‘What, Lars?’ she snapped. ‘Force? Infidelity? What did you have in mind?’
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Infidelity? I’m afraid that’s your side of the family.’
She kicked out across the bed, catching him in the shin. ‘How dare you!’
‘You can’t deny your father’s bastards are all over town. I don’t think even he knew how many.’
‘You know nothing about it,’ she said.
He sat up and faced her. ‘When I took over the firm, do you know how many of Thor’s women were on the books quietly receiving a cheque every month? Five, Ingrid. I thought I’d spare you the details, but perhaps I should have told you then.’
Ingrid got out of bed. ‘Perhaps you should follow his example. Get yourself a mistress and see if she can give you a better son than the ones you’ve got.’
‘You’re twisting what I said.’
‘I’m not. You want to keep me like a brood mare till you get your perfect young stallion. You’ve got six fine children, Lars. Enough!’
‘And you’ve never wanted for anything,’ he said. ‘I’ve never said no to you, no matter what you’ve asked for. So I say to you, enough!’
Ingrid stamped across the room. ‘I should have waited for Amundsen rather than marrying you!’ She slammed the door behind her, not caring if she woke the children.
‘Amundsen was never going to marry you!’ Lars bellowed after her.
‘That’s what you think,’ she muttered, pulling her dressing gown closed and heading downstairs.
She wished it was snowing. She wanted to run outside and get lost, disappear into it like her mother had. But it was a spring night out there, far too warm and pleasant.
She halted in front of her father’s portrait on the wall of the big lounge room, his long face a white blur in the dark. For all his faults, he was the only man who hadn’t broken a promise to her.
She remembered her fifteenth birthday. Thor had promised her a surprise and no matter how much she’d pestered, he wouldn’t reveal it. He’d smiled enigmatically and told her to be patient. When she tried again, he simply raised an eyebrow. ‘I hope you can show you’re worthy of it.’
Ingrid refused to let herself hope the surprise might be her mother returning. Nothing eventuated on the morning of her birthday, just a handful of presents of the ordinary kind, and a twinkle in Thor’s eye. She’d been packed off to school without ceremony and found it hard to concentrate on her lessons. The attentions of her friends, usually so welcome, became irritating so that she snapped at them and walked home alone.
Her sister Alvhild was at the gate, jiggling from one foot to the other, when Ingrid got to the house, her face chilled from the autumn air.
‘You’ll never guess who’s here,’ Alvhild said.
‘Who?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell.’
‘Well, be quiet then.’ Ingrid pushed past her and started down the path.
‘You’d better put on a smile,’ Alvhild taunted, following close behind. ‘Father will be cross if you’re in a temper.’
Ingrid rounded on her. ‘Shut up, I said!’
‘Ingrid!’ Her father’s voice was loud and Ingrid shrank. She hated to cause his anger but sometimes she couldn’t help it.
‘Father?’
He glared at her from the doorstep. ‘I thought you were adult enough for this, but perhaps I was wrong.’
‘I’m adult enough,’ she said, raising her chin. ‘For what, anyway?’
He shook his head in resignation. ‘Only to meet one of our greatest living Norwegians.’
Her irritation fell away at once. ‘Who? Nansen?’
A man stepped out from behind her father. He was too young to be Fridtjof Nansen, her long-time hero, and she felt a stab of disappointment.
‘She’s not a dissembler, that’s for sure,’ the man laughed. ‘I’m sorry to be such a letdown, Miss Dahl.’
‘Let me introduce Roald Amundsen, who has kindly consented to join us for your birthday dinner,’ her father said. ‘Go and change, and I trust your manners will improve before you rejoin us.’
Chastened, Ingrid escaped to her room. Roald Amundsen, having at last found the fabled route through the Northwest Passage, was almost as famous as the great Nansen, anyway. She flicked through her wardrobe looking for something to wear, but her best outfit was a child’s dress, frilled and ruffled. She was fifteen and this was her night. She was too old for such a frock.
Ingrid crept quietly into her father’s bedroom. Her mother’s dresses still hung in his closet, dusty and unused. She rifled through them. She knew what she was looking for, and felt a thrill when her fingers met the white silk. She took the dress back to her room, flung off her school clothes and drew the dress over her head. She pulled her auburn hair out of its plaits and brushed it with her mother’s fine hairbrush, until it cascaded over her shoulders. She squeezed her feet into a pair of her mother’s shoes that were half a size too small and then faced the mirror.
She’d grown in the past six months and in an adult’s dress she could see the woman she’d become. The white silk showed off her long red hair and small waist. She wanted to show Amundsen how capable she was, not how pretty, but she didn’t know how. She longed for her mother with a sudden pang. She’d lived without her for years now, but Thor hadn’t seemed to notice that she’d become a young woman and that some female guidance, as she stepped into womanhood, would be a welcome thing.
Ingrid ran her hand down the sides of the dress, squared her shoulders and went downstairs. The surprise on Roald Amundsen’s face made up for her father’s shock and his unspoken promise of later punishment. She saw, for the first time, how a man looked at a woman when he appreciated her and it was a heady experience. She felt her colour rise as it seemed he couldn’t look away from her and she was grateful when her father proposed a toast to Amundsen’s Northwest Passage success and they drank it enthusiastically. Amundsen must have been well over thirty, twice her age, but she couldn’t help sneaking sideways glances at him.
‘Your father tells me you want to be an explorer,’ Amundsen said as they sat for dinner and the servants began bringing in the first course.
‘Ingrid is kjekk og frisk jente,’ Alvhild broke in importantly. ‘Wants to be a girl and a boy.’
Amundsen picked up his glass. ‘I understand such girls can be adventurous without losing their womanliness,’ he said to Alvhild. ‘A very good thing, I would say.’
When Ingrid looked up, Amundsen gave her a quick wink and she smiled gratefully. ‘I want to go to the South Pole, Mr Amundsen.’
He smiled back at her. ‘Antarctica is a very long way off. What about the North Pole? It will be won very soon, I think. I’m planning to reach it myself, and there are plenty of others trying too.’
Ingrid shook her head. She’d known for years that the tale of her mother going with the Snow Queen was no more than a story told to a child, but it had left her with a lingering dread of that region.
Amundsen put his glass down on the table. ‘It’s a very long way and very expensive to go to Antarctica, but I tell you what, Miss Dahl. I hope to go there too. If you still want to be an explorer when I set out for the South Pole, I’ll take you with me.’
Ingrid kicked her sister triumphantly under the table and then remembered to nod in a ladylike manner and smile at him. ‘I’d like that very much, Mr Amundsen.’
‘We’ll see,’ her father had said, and then the talk turned to other things. But Amundsen had taken her hand most warmly at the end of the evening and the memory of his lips brushing her knuckles was the marker that her childhood was over.
For four years she’d waited for news that he was setting out for the South Pole. Lars Christensen, from the biggest ship-owning family in Sandefjord, tried to win her attention all that time, waiting each day to walk her to the school gates on his way to work, and accompanying her home each afternoon. But the thought of Amundsen, fuelled by his occasional friendly replies to her letters, caused her to keep Lars at arm’s length.
Ingrid was almost nineteen when Amundsen wrote to say he was leaving Norway in Nansen’s old ship Fram to try again for the North Pole. He said he still planned to head south when he came back from this trip. The thrill she felt on receiving the letter disappeared as she realised this meant waiting at least another couple of years.
Lars tried to comfort her. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it up to you.’
‘I’m not getting married,’ she told him. ‘I’m going south with Amundsen, after he’s claimed the North Pole. I don’t care how long it takes.’
He shrugged and turned up again the next day, and the next. Thor looked on Lars with favour, she knew, for though he was a long way down the procession of Christensen sons, Lars showed more promise than any of his older brothers. He had the mark of a man who knew what he wanted, and how to get it.
He took the bold step of kissing her goodbye one evening and before long he’d drawn her into dizzying pre-marriage embraces that took her by surprise and rocked her resolve. They started meeting in secret at the far end of her father’s garden in a secluded rock hollow and Ingrid found it harder and harder to resist him. One night when their caresses threatened to sweep her into uncharted territory, she pushed him away.
‘Don’t be like that,’ he said. ‘I want to marry you.’
‘You know I won’t say yes.’ She could feel her chest rising and falling with her breath, and tried to stop it.
He stroked her long hair and coiled it gently around his hand. ‘But Amundsen’s gone south,’ he said. ‘Without you.’
She pulled away from him, sliding her hair out of his grip. ‘Don’t be silly. Everyone knows he’s gone north.’
Lars shook his head. ‘It’s in the newspaper. Frederick Cook has beaten him to the North Pole. Amundsen’s sent word that he’s going to Antarctica instead, to race Robert Scott to the South Pole. Even his own crewmen didn’t know. He sent Scott a telegram from Madeira saying, Beg to inform, heading south.’
Ingrid’s lip trembled and she was alarmed to find she was about to cry in Lars’s presence. She turned away. ‘I don’t believe you. He promised to take me.’
He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’d never lie to you, Ingrid. But listen, I have an idea.’
She refused to look at him, but he continued. ‘You and I will go to Antarctica too. I’ve already commissioned our ship. She’s called Polaris, after you, my north star. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the shipyards to see her. When she’s finished we’ll sail south and continue my father’s search for Antarctic whaling grounds. You don’t need to wait for Amundsen. He’ll be too old to go south again, anyway.’
She turned to look at him and he drew her into his arms. ‘Nothing about us will be ordinary,’ he said, and pressed her body against his.
He’d won her. What choice did she have? Amundsen had left her behind and there was no other route to Antarctica that she could see. She and Lars wed within a few months.
The following year Amundsen reached the South Pole, beating Robert Scott in a race that became a legend. The explorer never married, though it was said he didn’t lack for female companionship. Ingrid liked to believe he stayed a bachelor out of disappointment that she hadn’t waited for him. There was no evidence for the idea, except the warmth in his eyes on the occasions she saw him over the years when Lars would invite the great explorers around to dinner or show them off at parties. Nansen, Amundsen and Riiser-Larsen: Norway’s three famous sons.
She’d been bereft when Amundsen fell victim to the land of the Snow Queen four years earlier. He was a genius in the air but on a search-and-rescue mission in the north his flying boat disappeared into the fog. The fact of her long marriage to Lars and her six children didn’t stop her jealousy when she read in the papers that an American heiress leading her own expedition to the Arctic had put her boat and all her personnel in the service of the rescue effort. Ingrid suspected Amundsen had been romantically involved with her. Louise Arner Boyd, an unmarried woman with a personal fortune that almost dwarfed Lars’s, had spent three months and thousands of dollars sailing back and forth between Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land and Greenland. She didn’t stop until the Arctic winter came down and any hope that his party might turn up, sheltering on some remote shore of the Barents Sea, was gone.
It seemed cruel that Nansen had died too, only a couple of years later. Norway’s greatest men from the days of exploration, gone. Only Hjalmar remained. One of Amundsen’s best friends, and her last link to him.
Outside the window the moon had risen and Ingrid could see the long stretch of Ranvik’s lawn running down to the fjord. It was true; her marriage to Lars Christensen, Consul for Denmark, shipowner and businessman, had been extraordinary in many ways. Not only was her husband the richest man in Sandefjord – or one of the richest at least – but for twenty years she and Lars had shared almost everything. She’d counted herself lucky when she saw the unions of her contemporaries evolve into sterile affairs, where husband and wife lived in separate orbits. She’d thought that could never happen to them.
She rubbed her eyes and yawned. It was late and she was tired. She’d made her point to Lars. She wasn’t going to give up on this one. She’d never forgiven Amundsen for breaking his promise, as Lars well knew.