Kathleen Scott did what she promised Con. She mourned publicly. She grieved privately. She chose life. There was so much of it left. She travelled. She celebrated her existence, her brief marriage, her freedom abroad. Her male admirers, she mostly ignored. They had no place in her heart. She ignored the untrue rumours, too, that she’d been Nansen’s lover when Con was dying eleven miles from safety, that she’d had an affair with Barrie and had toyed with other young men. None of that was important. What had drawn her to Con was not the purely physical. It was the challenge of souls, the confrontation of minds, the union of thought. This was what she missed most.
When she escaped from England, she missed her son. Yet she needed to feel she could choose to be alone, to follow her mind’s patterns to the extremes they took her when she did not have to bridle them. Only this way could she create the art she wanted to. Only this way could she deserve to think of herself as Robert Falcon Scott’s widow.
She knew his weaknesses; she had known them all along. Foolhardiness and too quick a temper may have been among them, and certainly a disposition to brood. Fear was not one of them. She smiled when she recalled how they had brooded together but apart, at either end of a chaise longue, and not spoken for a day. That was when they realised they were meant for each other.
Even now, married to her new husband Edward for twenty-five years, she carried her notebook everywhere: the notebook into which she had copied excerpts from Con’s diary in 1913 the night after Atkinson had given it to her.
She never tired of reading the words meant for her. They were her comfort. Edward felt no jealousy. Those days were precious to her, yes, but long gone.
She tried to imbue in her children that sense of urgency with which she enjoyed life, because, as she told them, it could all end tomorrow. Their childhood was all in the past. Now they were grown, she was inordinately proud of them. The present was what mattered, not the future.
Both wars had tested her health, but, as always, she raced through the days until she could stand no longer. Although the wars were now done and she had a sense of peace, she carved her character into each moment to make it her own. Pain she ignored. And she had no fear.
Then, at the end of 1946, she stopped making notes, and stopped writing from one day to the next. She tried to hide her weariness at first, but it grew to the point where she had no strength to leave her bed. On her first visit to the hospital in Paddington, she was diagnosed with leukaemia.
‘I shall certainly not write about being ill,’ she told Edward. ‘I want no unhappiness or misery in my books. Life is a joy, as simple as that.’
‘You are a marvel,’ Edward said. A few days later he stood by her bed, his hand gently on the back of her semi-conscious head. ‘I shall miss you, my dearest.’
She sensed Con sitting at the end of her bed.
‘Will you be mine again?’ he asked.
‘Do you still want me? I married again.’
‘I never stopped wanting you.’
‘And my new life?’
‘We can wind back time and stop it. Come to the Ice with me.’
‘I would like that.’