‘You might feel differently if you were me.’
‘Perhaps. But Jack.’ He turned to me, and his blue eyes were troubled. ‘Jack, do please believe me. I really
don’t
care what words you use, I care what you mean. And doesn’t all this’ – a sweep of his arm – ‘make all that irrelevant?’
‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ I said. ‘Class matters because money matters.’
‘I know, but—’
‘No you don’t. You’ve got a twenty-five-bedroom house in the West Country and three cars. How can you know? How can you know what it’s like to come down in the world, to miss your chance?’
‘But you haven’t missed your chance.’
‘Yes I have.’ Suddenly I was angry. ‘My family were all right once. Not like yours, but all right. My father was a Classics teacher. He was gassed in the War and couldn’t work, so we had to move, and I had to go to a school where they say ‘‘OK’’ instead of ‘‘grand’’. Then he got TB and died, and the Army wouldn’t give Mother a pension because he hadn’t got TB from being gassed. Then the slump came and I had to give up physics and be a sodding clerk . . .’ I broke off.
‘I didn’t know,’ said Gus.
‘Well you do now. So don’t brush it aside as if it doesn’t matter.’
After that, we didn’t talk. Gus stood twisting the signet ring on his little finger, and I felt embarrassed – and furious with myself for blurting things out. What’s got into me?
All day we’ve been making our way through the ice. I love it. The purity. The danger.
A man in the crow’s-nest calls directions, and Mr Eriksson steers the
Isbjørn
slowly through. At one point, he cut the engine, and some of the crew lowered a boat and went fishing. Others let down a ladder and climbed on to a floe the size of a football pitch, which abutted the hull. While they were filling a barrel with meltwater, the dogs jumped down on to the floe and raced about. We quickly followed.
I couldn’t believe it. A few days ago I was in London. Now I’m standing on an ice floe in the Barents Sea.
While the others were playing with the dogs, I wandered off to the edge. According to the ship’s thermometer, it’s only a couple of degrees below freezing, but it was colder on the ice. My breath rasped in my throat. I felt the skin of my face tighten. And for the first time in my life, I was aware of cold as a
menace. A physical threat. The ice was solid beneath my boots – and yet, I thought, a few inches below me, there’s water so cold that if I fell in, I’d be dead within minutes. And the only thing that’s keeping me away from it is . . . more water.
Moving closer to the edge, I peered down. The water was glassy green, extraordinarily clear. I experienced the feeling I sometimes get when I’m on a bridge or a railway platform. Rationally, you know that you’ve no intention of stepping off the bridge or the platform – or this ice floe – but you’re aware that you
could
, and that the only thing stopping you is your will.
Something slid through the water and vanished under the ice. I thought of all the lives hunting in the dark beneath my feet.
As I write this, it’s nearly midnight, and we’re still not through the ice. I can feel each turn the ship makes. The shudder of impact, the change in the engine as we reach a clear patch, the subdued roar as we push the smaller floes aside. I think of those great shards rocking, talking to themselves.
I suppose what Gus was trying to say is that here in the Arctic, class doesn’t matter. I think he’s wrong about that, class always matters.
But maybe up here it doesn’t matter so much.
By morning we were clear of the ice, and Mr Eriksson said we’d already passed the Sørkapp, the southernmost tip of Spitsbergen. But the fog wouldn’t let us see. All day we huddled on deck, waiting for a glimpse. It got colder. We kept running down to our cabins to pull on more clothes. And still nothing.
Some time after midnight, our patience was finally rewarded. The fog thinned, and although the sky remained overcast, the midnight sun behind the clouds cast a subdued grey radiance on an alien wilderness.
The Dutch whalers of the sixteenth century gave it the right name. Spitsbergen: the pointed mountains. I saw jagged peaks streaked with snow, looming over the mouth of a fjord where the black water was mirror-smooth, and dotted with icebergs. Further in, a vast, tormented glacier spilled into the sea. And all so incredibly still.
Hugo was shaking his head in disbelief. Even Algie was impressed.
Gus said quietly, ‘Do you realise, it’s nearly one in the morning?’
I tried to speak but I couldn’t. It was utterly unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was – intimidating. No, that’s not the right word. It made me feel irrelevant.
It made humanity irrelevant. I wonder if Gruhuken will be like this?
Hugo, the keen glaciologist, asked Mr Eriksson to head into the fjord to get nearer the glacier, and we craned our necks at fissured walls of ice and caverns of mysterious blue. From deep within came weird creaks and groans, as if a giant were hammering to get out. Then came a noise like a rifle shot, and a huge segment of ice crashed into the sea, sending up spouts of water, and a wave that rocked the ship. Shattered ice turned the sea a milky pale-green. The hammering went on. Now I know why people used to believe that Spitsbergen was haunted.
But as we headed north up the coast, I realised that despite all my reading, I’d made the classic mistake of imagining the Arctic as an empty waste. I’d thought that since it’s too far north for trees, there wouldn’t be much else except rocks. Maybe a few seals and sea-birds, but nothing like this. I never expected so much life.
Great flocks of gulls perching on icebergs, rising in flurries, diving after fish. An Arctic fox trotting over a green plain with a puffin flapping in its jaws. Reindeer raising antlered heads to watch us pass. Walruses rocking on the waves; one surfaced right beneath me with an explosive, spraying
huff!
and regarded me with a phlegmatic brown eye. The sleek heads of seals
bobbed on the surface, observing us with the same curiosity with which we observed them. Algie shot one, but it sank before the men could retrieve it. He would have shot a reindeer, too, if they weren’t protected by law. He seems to enjoy killing things.
We passed a cliff thronged with thousands of sea-birds. Gulls screamed, and the rockfaces echoed with the strange, rattling groans of black birds with stubby wings which Gus said were guillemots. He said what I’d taken for gulls were kittiwakes, and that the Vikings believed that their cries were the wails of lost souls.
Many of the beaches are littered with driftwood, borne from Siberia by the Atlantic current, and weathered to silver. And bones: huge, arching whale ribs many decades old. According to Mr Eriksson, we’re so far north that ‘dead things’ last for years.
But there are other, less picturesque remains. Abandoned mines, and the broken-down cabins of prospectors long gone. In an inlet I saw a post rising from a cairn of rocks, with a plank nailed across the top. I assumed it was a grave, but one of the seamen told me it was a claim sign.
I don’t like these human relics. I don’t want to be reminded that Spitsbergen has been exploited for hundreds of years. Whalers, miners, trappers, even tourists.
Thank God there’s only a handful of tiny settlements, and we’re not going near any of them.
Just before dinner, Mr Eriksson spotted something on an island, and brought the ship in closer.
At first I couldn’t see anything except a pebbly beach strewn with driftwood. Then I made out the blotchy, pinkish-brown carcass of a walrus, lying on its back. Its yellow tusks jutted upwards, and its body looked curiously deflated, like a giant, kicked-in football. Then I realised why. Something had gnawed a hole in its belly and eaten it from the inside.
The polar bear rose from behind a boulder and stretched its long neck to catch our scent.
It was my first glimpse of the king of the Arctic. But this was nothing like the snowy giant of my imagination. Blood and blubber had stained its pelt a dirty brown; its head and neck were almost black. I couldn’t see its eyes, but I sensed them. Until that moment, I’ve never felt like prey. Never been so intensely watched by a creature who would kill me if it got the chance. I stared at it, and I felt death staring back.
A shot rang out. The bear turned its head. Algie took aim again. Before he could shoot, the bear had ambled out of sight.
Kill or be killed. That’s what it comes down to. And
yet somehow, I don’t find that appalling. There’s truth in it. A kind of stark beauty.
I think that’s what the Arctic means to me. I think that up here, I’ll be able to ‘breathe with both lungs’, as Mr Eriksson says: to see clearly for the first time in years. Right through to the heart of things.
Disaster. Hugo tripped on a coil of rope and broke his leg.
Everyone went into emergency mode, very calm and stiff upper lip. ‘Buck up, old chap, we’ll soon set you to rights.’ The consequences were too huge to be voiced out loud.
The first mate splinted the leg, and we carried Hugo down to his cabin. Mr Eriksson, his face inscrutable, turned the ship about, and set course for Longyearbyen.
The first mate did what he could for Hugo, and then Gus, Algie and I squeezed into his cabin and tried to convince him that he hadn’t let us down and endangered the whole expedition.
‘Stupid, stupid, bugger bugger
bugger!
’ He pounded the mattress with his fists. His dark hair was plastered
to his temples, his cheeks flushed after a dose of cocaine from the medicine chest.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Gus said tonelessly.
‘ ’Course it isn’t!’ Algie robustly agreed.
I chimed in too late, and Hugo noticed. I didn’t care. I was furious with him.
Algie gave an uneasy laugh. ‘We seem to be jinxed, don’t we? First Teddy, now Hugo.’
‘Thank you for stating the blindingly obvious,’ said Gus.
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Hugo said, ‘Right. Here’s what we do. You’ll drop me off at Longyearbyen, where I’ll get myself patched up, and wire the sponsors and find a berth on the next boat home. And you chaps,’ he lifted his chin, ‘will carry on without me.’
Silence. No one wanted to admit that they’d been thinking the same thing.
Perplexed, Algie ran a hand through his carroty hair. ‘But – you’re our glacier fellow. Who’ll man the camp on the icecap?’
‘We’ll have to scrap it, of course,’ snapped Gus.
‘What?’ cried Algie. ‘But the dogs . . .’
‘Are now completely unnecessary,’ said Hugo. ‘God, Algie, you can be dim.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Algie. ‘What do we do about the dogs?’
Gus flung up his arms.
‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that we’d be better off without them. I asked Mr Eriksson if we could sell them in Longyearbyen, but he said the mine manager’s already got a team. He said . . .’ I hesitated. ‘He thinks we should put them down.’
A chorus of outrage. How could I even contemplate such a thing? The dogs would be useful in all sorts of ways: taking Algie about on his geological survey, warning us of bears. Suggestion emphatically overruled.
‘Right, then, we’re agreed,’ said Hugo, suppressing a wince as he shifted position. ‘I go home, and you three carry on without me. With the dogs. Yes?’
Nobody wanted to be the first to agree.
We left poor Hugo an hour ago in the ‘Sykehus’ at Longyearbyen. Tomorrow he’ll board the tourist yacht and head back to Tromsø. I’ll miss him. I think we could have been friends. I wish it was fat Algie who’d broken his leg.
Hugo didn’t want us to stay, which was a relief, because in Longyearbyen I felt as out of place as the tourists from that yacht.
God, what a dump. A ramshackle settlement of some five hundred souls, it’s all that’s left of the great Arctic ‘coal rush’. A few decades ago, a clutch of prospectors reported huge deposits, and greed took
over. Nations scrambling to stake claims, companies sprouting like mushrooms, raising millions on expectation alone. Most have gone bankrupt, or were bought for a song by the Norwegians, who now run what remains.
According to the books, Longyearbyen boasts electricity and water piped from a glacier, as well as a billiards hall and a bathhouse. What I saw were ugly miners’ barracks cowering at the feet of stark grey mountains. A cable railway strung along their flanks like a grimy necklace, its buckets dumping coal on the jetty in clouds of black dust. A single street strewn with rubbish and mobbed by screaming gulls. A wooden church and a cluster of grave-markers on a hill.
On our way back to the ship, we passed a group of miners heading for ‘town’. One turned his head and stared at me. His face was black with soot, his eyes angry and inflamed. He looked scarcely human. Capable of anything. I felt obscurely menaced. And ashamed.
It feels wrong that there should be such places on Spitsbergen. I’m glad Gruhuken is far away from all this. I don’t want it sullied.
First Hugo, now this.
Damn
Eriksson. He’s cast a pall over the whole expedition – and for what? He hasn’t even given us a reason.