Cold fog rising. Spectres emerged, frozen mouths wordless, faces jagged, their rigid eyes open. Behind them, a veil of ice.
‘Speak to me,’ Cherry cried out.
No answer.
‘Are you well?’ he called.
Silence.
‘Please, please.’
He thrashed about him blindly and screamed. Frozen, broken hands reached for him. There was no escape for him in his delusions. He was waiting and waiting at One Ton, the horizon edging away, his glasses icing over, waiting for them to appear from the white distance.
‘All’s well. All’s well,’ Scott should have answered. They should have survived. There was nothing now but Cherry’s rage in the cot of a small cabin on a mail steamer bound for Italy. He blamed Scott for killing the two men he loved above all others, and felt guilty for his anger.
The voices on the Ice had been tempting, delicious and friendly. They had made Cherry want to give up his life and stay. Now they taunted him. They burrowed into him with hatefulness and spite, and imbued his existence with dread. They serrated his nights and days, scratched sores into him he never would be able to erase, that would never heal.
Distance brought no relief. Throughout the long voyage, he picked over the expedition. He went through his notes page by page, over and over again, replayed in his mind the days at One Ton with Dimitri, tried to piece together his minutes and hours and days. Should he have needed his friends before they died? By the time the ship docked in Naples in late April 1913, he had still found no answer, and no redemption. This was his life now; a slave to the past’s questions.
His mother and sisters met him in Naples. Outwardly, he looked older, more mature. He was a man now, not a boy any longer. Inside, he was broken, but couldn’t show it. He hid his pain, his rage, his emptiness. How could he write the story of that expedition, that death march? Would he find the words to do them all justice?
When they finally reached the family home, Lamer, with May almost upon them, he walked straight into his study. Carefully, he sat down on his chair and listened for its familiar creak. Four years ago, he had spent a thousand pounds, a fortune, to join an expedition he knew next to nothing about. Three years ago, almost to the day, he had left without understanding the real dangers of the south. Was he any wiser? Doubt grabbed at him, made him sway. There were no answers in a changing world.
He walked across to the window and looked out into the garden. At least here nothing had changed. His trees were still there. Things were as they should be when a traveller returns home, except for the silence without the voices of his companions, without the wind shrieking up to the windows from the Pole, without the cold. He leaned his forehead against the cool pane, bit his lip. He could do nothing but move on, force the pace of his life, immerse himself in activity, and try to forget. No, he wouldn’t just try, he would forget.
That afternoon, he began to deal with all his business correspondence. It was past midnight when he finished sorting through it. Just before he retired for the night, he put his diary into the top drawer of his desk, and pulled out one solitary piece of paper. He dipped his pen into ink and scribbled one line onto the noisy paper. Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. He put the paper in the drawer with his diary and locked the desk. The rest would have to wait. There were other things to do for now, more important things.
But the past would not rest. A succession of trips took Cherry into London to raise funds for what was now a bankrupt expedition, and for the relatives of the dead. In June, he met the Terra Nova at Cardiff, finally returned from New Zealand. He would never see her again. And then the most painful trip to receive his Polar Medal at Buckingham Palace, another duty he didn’t enjoy. Yet he fulfilled it, because his life now was one of duty and honour. He was sincere when he asked his friends to come to Lamer whenever they wished. Many of them did so that summer, to celebrate an age which had passed too swiftly. Amongst them Ory Wilson, Edward Wilson’s widow.
‘You must have it back,’ she said, and pushed the green leather book into Cherry’s hand.
‘I gave it to Bill as a gift. He liked to read Tennyson. You must keep it,’ he said.
‘Then how shall I repay you?’
‘For what?’
‘For helping me through this. For helping me to sort out his things. For looking after him that winter.’
‘Oh, my dear Ory. He looked after me. He saved my life. Maybe I could have saved his.’
‘Don’t say that. You know that there was nothing you could do. They were still five days away from their final camp when you left One Ton. You could not have reached them. You would have died, too.’
‘But I am starting to believe what the papers say; that my failings led to the disaster.’
‘We all know differently. Let the others lie to save their own reputations. In the end, the truth will not be hidden.’
‘I hope you are right.’
‘I am. And you must listen to me. You must tell the real story in your book.’
‘When I write it.’
‘You will. I know you will. I trust you.’
They remained friends for the rest of her life. She never remarried.
When Cherry went to the Natural History Museum in London to deliver the precious penguin eggs he’d harvested with his lost friends Bowers and Wilson, he was pushed from pillar to post, from one curator to another, ignored and patronised. Their ignorance and arrogance hurt him deeply. It took him a day to get a receipt for the eggs. And then they were put in some cupboard and forgotten. When they were finally examined, they contributed nothing to the advancement of science. The journey, the hardship, the friendships, had been for nothing.
As Cherry’s delusions grew more vicious, he was increasingly crippled by stomach cramps. By now he was a stranger to sleep, the mental and physical torture too much for his body, the veil of fog and guilt more difficult to penetrate, the spectres impossible to identify. What he saw was skeletal; yellow frostbite, skin flaking from bone, a frozen hell.
Life fragmented. He spent a lot of time with Bowers’ elderly mother and sister. But nothing could bring Bowers or Wilson back. The years at Cape Evans had been the best of his life, the worst of his life, the most fulfilling, the most wasted. And still that piece of paper remained locked in his desk. He had no use for it.
Then came the first of two world wars, a needless war. He served in Flanders, but his stomach wouldn’t let him see it out, and he was invalided home. Many of his Antarctic friends died in the devastation of Europe. He grew more alone and more withdrawn. He was a man out of time, a man lost, a man without future and without love.
Kathleen came to stay with him. She recognised his anger, his depression, his need.
‘Don’t give up,’ she said one night, after Peter, Con’s son, had gone to bed.
‘I’m not giving up.’
‘It seems like it to me.’
‘There is too much to think of, too much to grab hold of and put into one place.’
‘Make notes. Just write without it making sense.’
‘But it has to make sense.’
‘Not when you first write it, it doesn’t. You can always edit it later.’
‘I’m not sure I have the will to.’
‘You have. I know it. Con knew it.’
‘Ah yes, Con.’
‘He made mistakes like everyone else.’
‘But he was the leader.’
‘Can leaders not make mistakes, too?’
‘I suppose they can. I suppose they must. To be human.’
‘And he was human.’ They listened to the fire.
‘Were you never afraid of him not coming back?’ he asked, looking at her long hair, permanently in motion.
‘Not really. I told him to do what he thought was right.’
‘Did you ever think you pushed him too hard?’
‘What?’
‘That he might have overstretched himself to please you?’
‘No. Never. He had a mind of his own, you know.’
‘I didn’t mean you forced him. I’m just trying to make sense of it all.’
‘There is no sense in it, Cherry, my dear boy. No sense at all.’
‘How then can I write a book about it?’
‘To put it all into perspective.’
‘But many of you don’t want me to write the truth.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The oil shortages. The fact that his orders grew muddled. That the dogs went nearly four hundred miles further towards the Pole than he had planned. That he didn’t change his orders despite taking the dogs so far. That I didn’t have enough food for the dogs to take them further south than One Ton to meet him and Birdie and Bill. All that.’
‘Some people think it would do harm to mention his errors, she said.’
‘But why?’
‘Because he is such an example to the troops just now. Because his diaries are an inspiration to the men in the trenches.’
‘But shouldn’t the truth be told?’
‘Only if it is of use.’
‘I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t tell the story the way I saw it.’
‘I think you must do what you will. It is obvious you won’t listen to me, or any of the others.’
‘Do you really want Teddy Evans to be able to avoid the fact that Con wanted him off the expedition? Do you really want him to carry on parading half-truths to the public in his lectures?’
‘That’s not my decision.’
She looked at him and sat up straight, her back against the hardness of the chaise longue in the Lamer library. Dared him to contradict.
‘And it’s not my decision either,’ he said. ‘I shall write my book. I shall be honest. And I shall publish it myself.’
‘Let’s not become enemies over this.’
‘I have no intention of becoming your enemy, Kathleen. Even my grief pales beside yours.’
‘Do you know, Cherry, maybe it does. But I can’t judge that. I can’t comprehend your grief. As little as you can comprehend mine.’
‘Are we agreed, then?’
‘I have no influence over you. You know that. I wish you luck.’
‘I miss them all, you know. Not just Bill and Birdie. Con, too. And all the others who have gone since.’
‘I understand. I really do.’
He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. It was his only pleasure.
‘Cherry?’ she asked.
‘Mm?’
‘If I tell you something private, will you keep it out of the book?’
‘Unless it affects the truth, yes.’
‘A month or so before they set out for the Pole, I had a bad dream about Con.’
‘Go on.’
‘I can’t really remember the dream, but I woke with a start. And then Peter came into the room with that determined little walk of his. And that serious face under the cherub’s smile.’
She drew breath, took a sip of her red wine.
‘And?’ Cherry asked.
‘He came up to me, really close up to me. I was shivering. And he said, quite emphatically, Daddy won’t come back.’
‘And you remember nothing of the dream?’
‘You don’t seem surprised.’
‘Why? – should I be?’
‘People seem to think dreams are just so much poppycock.’
‘I don’t.’
‘And premonitions figments of the imagination.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I may not believe in God –’
‘Neither did Con.’
‘I may not believe in God, but I believe there are greater forces at work than we can ever comprehend, that there is motion in the universe which we can’t foresee, and which may link us to each other or to events we should rationally know nothing about.’
‘I did tell Con about Peter and the dream in a letter, but he never got it, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Does it shock you that I half believed that Con would die? And that his death came as no real surprise to me?’
‘No, it doesn’t. But I don’t know if that’s because you knew he was going to do a dangerous thing, or because I believe in the power of the spirits.’
‘You are a strange man.’
‘I am a contradiction, even to myself.’
‘Did you see anything out there to persuade you that spirits were at work?’
Cherry hesitated. Lit another cigarette. ‘Yes and no. I can’t explain it.’
‘But you carry it with you?’
‘Yes. And the doubt and the guilt.’
‘Stop the guilt. There is nothing to be gained from it.’
‘And the doubt?’ he asked.
‘Doubt is healthy. It will keep you alive.’
‘And destroy me from the inside at the same time.’
‘Only if you let it.’
‘I am not as strong as you.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’
‘Can I ask you something that you won’t pass on?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you hear any voices in that dream?’
‘No one spoke, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But?’
‘I’m sure I heard someone sing.’