I spot her as soon as I get into the train. She leans against the door when it closes. There’s nowhere else to go, and she can’t be bothered to find somewhere to sit, doesn’t seem the kind of woman who wants to be offered a seat. She’s got boots on that make her legs appear really thin. I try not to make it too obvious that I’m staring at her. She gets a book out of her pocket, but I can’t make out its cover. She’s too far away from me, and I don’t dare move closer. When I’m not expecting her to, she raises her eyes and scowls at me. How pale she is, how perfect. I hadn’t realised how lonely I am. I turn away.
My stop approaches too soon. I’ll have to walk past her to get out. As the train slows, I try to move across the carriage without catching her eye again. I’m halfway out when she collapses. There’s nothing I can do but catch her. Her book drops out of her hands, her eyes closed. I stumble out with her in my arms, kick her book onto the platform. Everyone else just stares or pushes past me. No one bothers to help. Bloody London.
I drop down onto one of the benches by the wall and catch my breath. What now? I check her pulse. It seems OK, if a little shallow. Her face is so drawn, her teeth clenched, her lips tight and thin. Hell, I’ve got a real, warm, beautiful woman in my arms for the first time in ages and she’s unconscious, and I don’t know what to do. When the train’s gone and the platform empty, I get up, turn, and lower her miniscule weight onto the bench.
Why am I doing this? I do give some of my time to charities, to help people who can’t help themselves. And it’s my duty to pick up this scrap of a girl in trouble. I can’t just walk away. That’s too easy. I did it once, a long time ago, and I’ve regretted it ever since. And I suppose part of me is thinking I might at last have found someone who’ll want to depend on me, who will see me as a strong man. Because, despite everything I do, my life lacks that.
The platform’s filling up again when her eyes flicker open and she tries to sit up. She puts her hands into her jacket pockets, and pulls them out again, empty.
‘Where’s my book?’ she says. ‘I need my book.’
I get down on my knees in front of her, retrieve it from under the bench, get up again, and hand it to her.
‘What’s that all about?’ I say. ‘The Worst Journey in the World?’
‘The Antarctic.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’ve got notes in it.’ She seems calmer now, stuffs the dog-eared book back into her jacket, and tries to get up.
‘Take it easy,’ I say.
‘I need to get to the Royal Geographical Society,’ she says.
‘You sure that’s a good idea?’
‘I don’t have a choice.’
‘Have you fainted before?’
‘Coupla times. I just don’t eat enough.’ She scowls at me. She’s a scary, skinny thing.
‘You should get yourself checked out,’ I say. ‘And you need some food.’ I’ll get her up to the fresh air and then she can sort herself out. ‘Come on.’ I get up, throw my bag over my back and hold out my arm to her.
She grabs hold of it and pulls herself up.
‘OK?’ I say.
She nods, links arms with me, and doesn’t let go as we walk along the tunnel towards the exit. In the lift up to the street, she leans against me, dizzy again. Her short, blonde hair smells of lemons, and she’s trembling. She pulls away when we walk out into the fresh, cold November air. It’s too much, and she trips. I catch her by her small hand. It’s freezing cold. I let go as soon as I can. Touch talks, and I don’t want her to know what I’m thinking.
‘What now?’ I say. ‘You really need something to eat.’
‘Can’t be bothered.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, and I don’t even know you, but you’re being stupid.’
She shakes her head. ‘You don’t understand. I’ve got to be there. It’s important.’
I scratch my head. Why am I getting involved? I’ve sorted her out, haven’t I? She’ll be fine. I’ve got a meeting in an hour. But I can’t forget that child in my head, that beggar child in Rome I walked past, now years ago, too weak even to ask for help. An hour later, on the way back, all I saw was a patch of blood on the pavement. My fault, to see that and walk away.
‘It won’t take a minute,’ I say. ‘You can get something over there.’
We walk across to the shop without talking. I watch her through the shop window, how narrow she is, how her clothes cling to her, how beautiful she is.
‘Why did you keep eyeing me up on the Tube?’ she says, her mouth full, when she comes out of the shop.
I blush. ‘I wasn’t really,’ I say. ‘I just like watching people.’
‘That makes two of us, then.’
My blush fades. ‘You seem OK now. I should get on.’
She throws the sandwich box violently into the bin. ‘Tell you what,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Because I’m asking you. It seems a shame to just let you go now that coincidence made us meet.’
My heart quickens. ‘I’ve got a meeting in an hour.’ I feel regret as I speak.
‘Cancel it,’ she says. ‘Skive. You don’t look like a man who does a lot of skiving.’
‘Live a little.’ She laughs.
I text to cancel my meeting. ‘There,’ I say. ‘And, by the way, I’m Adam.’
‘I’m Birdie.’
‘Interesting name.’
‘I’ll explain it to you sometime.’
‘There may not be another time.’ I specialise in afterthoughts.
‘Who knows?’
I can’t make out if she’s being patronising or flirtatious, so I say nothing and tag along, making sure, all the time, that she’s not about to fall over again. On the Tube, I make her sit down. There’s no seat for me, so I have to stand half a carriage away from her. But I don’t play my usual game of counting how many fanciable women there are, and watch her instead, her stillness. I feel a confusing degree of tenderness for someone I’ve only just met. She fascinates me, draws me to her.
‘D’you know anything at all about the Antarctic?’ she says when we surface in South Ken.
‘Just what I learned at school. Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole. Amundsen got back. Scott didn’t. Oh, and it’s bloody cold out there, and dark most of the time.’
‘Great summary. Go to the top of the class.’ She shakes her head.
We carry on walking.
‘You do know the Natural History Museum, though?’ she says.
‘’Course. Been there. Dinosaurs and all that.’
‘But what’s it got to do with my book?’
‘Should I care?’
She stops. I hadn’t noticed she’s out of breath. She has to crane her neck to look me in the face, smiles for the first time. I smile back at her brown eyes. ‘The guy who wrote it, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, spent six weeks walking through the pitch-black Antarctic winter to Cape Crozier, just to get three penguin eggs, and bring them back here.’
‘The point being?’
‘One of the blokes with him was Henry Bowers, also known as Birdie.’
‘You’ve got a man’s name?’
‘Let me finish. Bowers died with Scott.’
‘You’re related to him, then?’
She smiles, despite herself, I think. ‘No, he didn’t have any kids as far as anyone knows. He still lived with his mum when he went on Scott’s expedition.’
‘So why the name?’
‘My parents were obsessed with the Antarctic, and Dad reckoned he might find out he was the son of Bowers’ love child, so they christened me Henrietta Birdie Bowers.’
‘And you’re mad about him?’
‘I admire him, but he didn’t live long enough to leave anything lasting behind.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘It is a bit.’ She gets the book out of her pocket. ‘But Cherry meant this to be a memorial to him.’
‘So why are you so keen to get to the RGS?’
‘I’ve persuaded them to show me some stuff from the Scott expedition.’
‘And it had to be today?’
She nods. ‘The thing is, there’s a mystery about the Pole journey no one’s solved.’
‘And that’s why you’re in a state.’
‘I’ve been obsessing about it since Dad died.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘That’s done.’ She wipes whatever pain she feels away with an impatient arm and starts walking again. ‘Scott, Bowers and Wilson died eleven miles from the next food depot, and they were stuck there for ten days because of a blizzard, according to what Scott wrote.’
‘What’s odd about that?’ I say.
‘It’s been scientifically proven that Antarctic blizzards only last three to four days.’
‘Without a doubt?’ This is interesting.
‘Without a doubt. That’s why I want to find out what really happened.’
‘You think Scott was lying?’
She shrugs. ‘Not necessarily. Delusions of a dying man, maybe.’
‘Hasn’t anyone else tried?’
‘Lots of people, but no one’s come up with anything that makes sense.’
‘So why this sudden urgency?’
‘It’s nearly a hundred years since it happened. Time we knew the truth.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does to me. And I’ve never been near any of the gear they had with them,’ she says. ‘We’re here. Want to come in with me?’
‘I’d love to, but I don’t want to intrude.’
‘You won’t. I need some support for once.’
‘Then I will.’ I willingly give in.
Inside, there’s an unreal hush. She walks up to the reception desk, transforms herself into someone much taller, much more determined than the sick, grieving woman who fell into my arms and walked here with me.
‘Miss Bowers here to see Leo McAllister,’ she says to the woman behind the desk.
‘I’ll let him know you’re here. Take a seat, please.’
We retreat to the high glass windows and watch the traffic.
‘What are you expecting to see?’ I say.
‘Just a few things. Stuff from the expedition’s spread out all over the world. Some here, lots more at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, some in the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand. And the royals have got a stash of it, too, so we’ll never get our hands on that.’
When Leo McAllister arrives, she introduces me as her assistant. He’s tall and spare, and looks old. I follow the two of them along a maze of corridors and doors.
‘I’ve laid most of our artefacts out on the table,’ Leo says. ‘As you know, you’ll have to wear these cotton gloves to make sure there’s no damage.’
‘Sure,’ she says.
The three of us pull on our gloves.
‘I’ll just explain what these are,’ Leo says.
What I see looks insignificant. There are just a few ancient containers, a couple of sorry-looking cotton bags, and a stack of discoloured magazines.
Leo picks up one of these things after another, tells us where it was found, and what he thinks is significant about it. He only takes ten minutes, but what he says leaves me shell-shocked. I hadn’t anticipated the rawness of history.
‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ he says. ‘Is that enough time for you?’
‘Yes, thank you very much,’ Birdie says. Does she always change like this, from surly to polite, from weak to strong, from panicked to calm?
He closes the door behind him, and we don’t speak for a moment. The room shrinks. She takes a deep breath, steadies herself on one of the chairs, then finally picks up a metal matchbox holder, rusty, tinged with the brown flecks of time. Leo told us it was found next to Scott’s body. The dead live on in their traces. She hands it to me. Its lightness catches me by surprise, and I almost drop it. I put it on the table and open it. There are still matches in here, unused ones. I count them out onto the table. Eighty-eight of them.
‘Why didn’t they use them all?’ I say into her brittle silence.
‘They ran out of fuel. They spent those ten days in that tent without any fuel. That’s why they died. They couldn’t even make themselves a cup of tea.’ She shivers.
I put the matches back into the box. They’ll never be used.
‘Are you all right?’ I say.
She doesn’t answer, moves along the table to the provision bags that were found in the tent. She caresses them with her gloved fingers, looks around, and quickly pulls off one of the gloves, runs the back of her bare hand across the bags two or three times.
‘What are you doing?’ I whisper.
‘I just needed to touch, feel, to get close to them. To something more organic than metal.’ There’s strain in her voice. Her tiny body trembles with it. I want to reach out, but I can’t, I just can’t. To have caught her fainting body that short hour ago is less of an intimacy than to put my arms around her now, although that’s what I want to do – to wipe her face dry, to make her smile again.
She laughs tearily, pulls her gloves back on. She picks the bag up again, weighs it in the palm of her hand, sniffs at its ochre stains. ‘Curry powder. You know …’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Scott blamed himself for getting frostbite in his feet because, one evening, he accidentally mixed some of this with his food and it gave him the trots, weakened him.’ She wipes her nose with the back of her hand.
‘Does any of this get you any closer to finding out what happened?’ I say. ‘All this pain?’
She shakes her head. ‘But it makes me closer to them. It’s real after all the books and notes. This is an addiction it’s impossible to cure.’
How many books has she read, how many notes has her father left her? Does she believe anything beyond what he told her? Maybe she’s just dealing with her grief this way. Mourning for Bowers is mourning for her father. Maybe carrying his name has burdened her with another kind of grief and guilt, too, the kind we feel when the past drifts off beyond recollection and memory into anecdote and dream.
She drifts off along the table again, reaching out with her long fingers. She’s as lonely as me, isn’t she, surrounded by her father’s notes and books, and nothing but hopes and mysteries? She’s lost in a world of trying to find something that may not exist. Maybe that’s all she wants from her life, to dig over the remnants of passed time.
‘What if there really was a ten-day blizzard? What if you’re just kidding yourself about finding a new answer?’
‘Impossible.’ She glares at me. ‘You think I’m a fool, don’t you?’
‘I didn’t –’
‘What? You didn’t what?’ The anger forces her muscles into sharp, defined patterns. Her legs, her arms, her stomach just visible above the waistband, her entire body, confront me with their taut challenge. I ward her off with open palms before she gets close enough to touch.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt, or offend, whatever it is I did. It all just seems –’
‘Stupid?’ She raises her voice even more.
‘Shhh. No, not that. Just somehow unreal. Dangerous for you, to your sanity.’
‘You don’t know me very well.’ She turns away, looks towards the window at the end of this long grey room. ‘You don’t know me at all.’ She stops moving, stands entirely still. ‘And I don’t know you. Sorry.’
We put on our coats, and retrace our steps to the reception where we shake hands again with Leo. It’s over.
‘Good luck,’ he says.
And then we’re out into the dampness of an English winter once again.