This piece of alternative historical fiction – a what if? story, based on historical events turning out a little bit differently – was shortlisted for the HWA Dorothy Dunnett Prize in 2017.
It is 1938. Captain Robert Falcon ‘Con’ Scott (ret’d) is 70.
Had there been a ship I should have gone down with it. Had there been a charge, I should have been at its head. But there was no ship and no charge – only a march, the most terrible of marches, and a terrible end; an end in which I – we – had no choice, no suffrage.
If there is another war coming – and Peter, seldom-stumped Peter, assures me that there is – then each sailor and soldier should feel glad to have an enemy at whom to aim, and to know which front to face. Peter himself will fight, I suppose: I must be sure to tell him, before he goes, to be thankful, when the saltwater blinds his eyes and the bridge is yawing through full eighty degrees – when the air is sick with blood and artillery smoke – when, that is, even Peter, even sailing, skating, painting Peter, is quite, quite lost – I must tell him to be thankful for the commander who will tell him which way he must steer and which way he must direct his fire. And if the war grants him a choice between life and death he should try and be thankful for that, too.
We had no enemy and no choice. It is no use wondering what our choices would have been. The choice in the end was His and His alone and once He had made it I at last had an enemy of my own.
‘Brooding again.’ Young Sarah, cleaning away my tea things.
‘Yes. Well – thinking. Which I suppose you would say amounts to the same thing!’
Sarah wags her heavy chin with a smile.
‘Yes,’ she says. She clatters my cup and saucer on to the tray. ‘The way you think. You’re not thinking about rainbows and daisies, are you, sir?’
‘There is a good deal more to life than rainbows and daisies, Sarah,’ I tell her. She says Tut.
Then I begin to tell her that in fact I was thinking about Peter but then for some unfathomable reason I tell her instead that I was thinking about Kathleen.
‘Ah! See, brooding, like I said.’ She does not smile any more, though. She straightens up with the laden tray in her hands.
‘Is it not natural that I should miss her?’ I ask.
‘It’s been a while, that’s all.’ She balances the tray on one hand and without looking at me – I think she is looking at Kathleen’s portrait on the wall – she smooths the front of her dress.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes,’ she says. Then she goes out.
If I was thinking of Kathleen at all it was to suppose that she would not have made quite such a clatter in clearing away the china. Still, Sarah does a good job in keeping all shipshape. It seems a shame that I am not able to help her more. I should like to be busier.
Painter Peter has tried to interest me in watercolours. And indeed I have tried. I sit at the window that overlooks the lake and daub at the easel that Peter has rigged up for me there. I try to paint the gulls. But my ruined right hand will not hold a brush and my attempts at painting with the left have so far been less than impressive.
Last Christmas, Peter mischievously sent one of my paintings to Oriana Wilson. It was a painting of three black-headed gulls upon the water, and a painting of which I was relatively proud (although the awkwardness of my technique meant that the representation of the gulls was perhaps more impressionistic than I should have liked). I had not asked Peter to send the painting.
Oriana later wrote that the picture had reminded her of her own dear Bill – old dear Bill Wilson, who lay down beside me and died. She wrote that Bill’s brushes and things had not been used since he went away – that she would have liked to put them to good use herself, but had no talent for art – that she was sorry Bill had not been able to see for himself what a fine artist Con’s boy had become, that she was glad that we, Peter and I, seemed to be carrying on Bill’s work, that she hoped I thought of Bill each time I sat myself at my easel. She wrote, recalling Browning, that nature was God’s art.
Bill Wilson was many times the artist I will ever be. Peter too. The brushes feel so foreign in my left hand. But I will master it in the end.
It is the idleness that is the most trying thing of all.
I ought, I suppose, to read more: here, by my side, are all the books they bring me. Haldane and Chatton on cytology, brought by Peter – Milankovitch on climate cycles, sent by Charles Wright at the Admiralty – Debenham at Cambridge sends his new book on map-making, and Griff Taylor (who these days roams the Empire stirring up bother within colonial faculties) sends his latest book from Toronto –
In the newspapers one reads of this latest expedition on Everest. How splendid it would be! Of course, one also thinks of poor Mallory – last seen ‘going strong for the top’.
The same newspapers have called me ‘Scott of the Antarctic’. They’d have called Mallory ‘Mallory of Everest’ if only he’d made it back. It’s bloody silly. Makes you sound like a king. If anyone’s the king of Antarctica it’s your Mr Amundsen – but that would suggest, I think, that Amundsen conquered Antarctica, and he didn’t – he went there and came back again, which is more than many a poor soul did, but he didn’t conquer it. You can’t conquer it.
Everest the same.
And then you’ve Gordon of Khartoum – the Mahdists killed him and cut off his head – and you’ve Clive of India – killed himself, poor fellow, when the pain became too great.
I am not anybody of anywhere and I have no wish to be. Scott of Nowhere. That has a ring to it!
*
‘Sun’s out. Birds are singing. Leaves, look. Spring’s here.’
‘You are quite the poet, Sarah.’
‘Just words, isn’t it.’
‘Well, yes. Just words. I’m no poet myself.’
‘You was a man of action, Captain Scott.’
Past tense, note.
‘I suppose I was, for a time.’
‘No suppose about it.’
‘Not that I didn’t enjoy poetry. Kipling, Stevenson. Palgrave! Who is man, and what his place?’
‘No good asking me, sir.’
‘No. Kathleen was the literary one of us, of course. In with all the poets and playwrights.’
‘Well, she was a looker, and no mistake. It’s to be expected.’
‘She was a fine artist, Sarah. I fancy that it was her mind that attracted them.’
‘That too, p’raps,’ says Sarah.
We are at the water’s edge. Sarah has wheeled me here and now she places a small plate of sandwiches on my lap and plants a saucer and teacup firmly in my unresisting right hand. I thank her and lift the teacup with my left.
For such a long time even that felt strange: drinking tea with the wrong hand. It was like being south again. Everything had to be re-learned (a metal buckle is an easy thing to fasten, until you have to fasten it at twenty degrees below, and your fingers raw with wounds that won’t heal; a shoelace a simple thing to tie, until it has to be tied one-handed).
And it was like being south in another way. It was like a new world. It was like being lost.
‘Look at these,’ says Sarah. ‘What a racket!’
‘Redshanks,’ I say.
We are on a sort of shingle beach that leads down to the mere’s edge and there is a sort of spit extending out into the mere for a distance of perhaps forty-five yards. On this spit, a gaggle (is that the word? Bill would have known) of redshanks has assembled. They bustle here and there, chattering noisily.
‘You get all sorts of funny birds here.’
‘Yes.’
Peter has spoken of his ambition to establish a ‘reserve’ for birds, here at Slimbridge; a haven or asylum where the birds might live without being trapped or shot at; a place of peace for them. It seems rather a pipe-dream to me.
In any case, I think birds generally come to a bad end, whether they’re trapped or shot at or not. Cold. Stoats. Sparrowhawks. Hunger. God, it is said, notes the fall of every sparrow. I don’t think it has ever occurred to God to try to catch a sparrow – even just one, never mind all of them.
‘We had penguins in the south, of course,’ I say.
‘Well, you would, nat’rally.’
I chew for a second on a salmon sandwich, and then I say: ‘Do you know what we did to them, Sarah?’
‘No, and I don’t much care to know.’
‘We pithed them. That was what we called it.’
‘I – ’
‘Bill Wilson came up with the method. They’re jolly resilient, penguins, though you wouldn’t think it – they can take half a dozen shots from a gun and keep on waddling. So Bill came up with the idea of ‘pithing’ them, the idea being that you catch your penguin, which was never very difficult, the poor blighters can’t even fly away, and then what you do is – ’
‘Now sir, I don’t – ’
‘ – you push a needle through the back of its head, into its brain. In twenty seconds, it’ll stop struggling.’
There’s a short silence. Then Sarah says: ‘It seems cruel to me, but what do I know.’
‘Nothing.’ This temper of mine. ‘Nothing, Sarah. If you think that is cruelty then by God you don’t know a damn’ thing.’
‘There’s no need – ’
‘Better, do you think, to be drowned and devoured by a killer-whale? Mangled by a leopard-seal? Better to be eaten in the egg by a skua or to starve to death in the Antarctic winter?’
‘I didn’t say – ’
‘In the south,’ I say, ‘we had with us, each of us, thirty opium tablets apiece. On the – the last march. At first they were in Bill’s medical kit but I ordered him – he didn’t want to, I ordered him – to hand them out: to each man his ration. Each man’s destiny in his own hands.’
‘But you didn’t take them.’
‘Would it have been such a sin if I had? If Cherry hadn’t found me, at the end – ’
I don’t finish the sentence. I think of Oates. We didn’t send him out, we only let him go, as if that makes the blindest bit of difference. Yes, we let him go, and we laced up the door behind him.
Cruel, I suppose.
‘There’s a thin line indeed, Sarah,’ I say, ‘between cruelty and mercy.’
We are both silent for perhaps a minute. Gulls clamour over the water.
‘If you don’t mind me saying so, sir,’ Sarah says, ‘I don’t think you know a bloody thing about it.’
*
Sarah came to us in ’32. Rather, she came to me – for it was after Kathleen’s death, in the autumn after Kathleen’s last summer, that I found myself in need of more help than our small staff of servants could provide. She might have been thirty years of age then. She came from Ilkley, in Yorkshire, highly recommended by the Middletons (friends, inevitably, of Kathleen). Luke Middleton told me that she would be perfect for the post, as she had done a grand job of nursing his father through his final illness, and, and – he tailed off, and fingered his moustache in embarrassment.
I shrugged off the implication. I am not, in any case, ill. Sick, perhaps.
Sarah grew up in Bradford, an awful place, and at her mother’s knee there learned the arts of cleaning, cooking, grieving and plain-speaking.
‘Of course, I am not alone in having suffered loss,’ I say, somewhat embarrassed.
I know (but had forgotten) that Sarah lost her brothers, three of them all in one month, barely four years after I had lost my comrades (I might just as well call them my brothers). Two at the Somme, one at sea. There was a sister, too, a younger sister – dead, I gathered, before the war, from some industrial pestilence.
‘It isn’t that,’ Sarah says.
‘Oh.’ I sip my tea. It’s weak. A Navy man never loses his taste for crude tea. I feel a little lost.
‘It isn’t just you, Captain Scott,’ she says, and I still don’t understand, and I bark at her, ‘Of course it’s just me! Just me, out of the lot of us, Bill dead, Birdie Bowers dead, Titus Oates, Evans, all of them, except me.’
‘You – ’
‘And Kathleen, dead. I was the one who survived the south and I was the one that survived our marriage. I have survived and survived, all I have done is survive, and there isn’t anyone who can even tell me why – and now, yes, Sarah, it is just me. Just me.’
Sarah is leaning on the handles of my wheelchair and through my body I can feel her breathing. I hear her gulp.
She pronounces a wet glottal syllable and I say ‘What? Speak clearly!’ and she gulps again and says ‘Peter’. My son, Peter, she means, I suppose. I still don’t understand.
‘I am not talking about Peter,’ I say.
‘Well you bloody should be, sir.’
I throw my teacup to the floor. The weak tea splashes on to my slippers. The cup doesn’t break – it rolls over twice on the damp grass, and is still. I’m left with the saucer wedged in my useless hand. I feel hapless.
‘Damnation,’ I say, not knowing quite what I mean to express.
‘It isn’t about my brothers,’ Sarah says, in a voice that now sounds stiff with the effort of emotional containment. ‘Nor my sister, poor Esther, poor little thing.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’m trying to say, sir, that you’ve a child, a son, a fine one and all – and all you can do is harp on what you’ve lost.’
‘You know the pain of grief, Sarah. I would have thought you would understand.’
‘Aye, I do, I understand it better than you, if you don’t mind me saying.’
I do mind. But I let her speak.
‘We lose at one end and gain at the other.’ She pauses. She drums her fingers on the frame of my chair. ‘That didn’t come out right. I don’t know how to say it. I mean, as you go along, people fall by the wayside. Friends. Brothers.’
‘I’m aware of that, Sarah.’
‘But as we go along we pick up new friends. Husbands, wives. Nieces and nephews. Children,’ she says, or rather tries to say, because her voice fails part-way through the word ‘children’, and of course now I understand, as I should have understood long before, were I not such a fool.
In the South, during the long winters, we passed the evenings with lectures, informative talks from the experts among us: Wilson on ornithology, Debenham on geology, Ponting on photography, Meares on his travels round the world – whatever it might be. I always enjoyed them.
I never expected that in my seventy-first year – the winter of my life – I should be lectured in grief by one whose expertise exceeds my own. If you had told me so I should have doubted that there ever was such a one.
‘Ah. Sarah – ’
‘I was nineteen. Just after the war. Not much to tell. Weren’t wed. My Aunty Ann took me to a lady in Shipley, and, well.’ She breathes hard through her nose. ‘And then after, the doctor said – ’
She stops. I’m glad she stops. I listen to her breathing and, after a few moments, once I have mastered my own emotions, I say: ‘I am sorry.’
‘It was like coming to a dead-end. That’s what it felt like, like running up against a brick wall. And it still feels like that. But you, sir, you’ve got – ’
‘Peter, yes. I have. I have. I am fortunate.’
People have often said that I was fortunate – not to my face, but they have said it, behind their hands, or in newspapers, that I was a damned lucky blighter to have made it through when all the rest perished. There was a judgment in it when they said it. I don’t say that it was a fair judgment but nor have I ever blamed anyone for making it.
It was a judgment I never made myself. I never felt fortunate.
‘You’ve to look on the bright side,’ Sarah says.
I almost laugh at the lumpen banality of it. Then I almost weep. I do neither; instead, I clumsily break a crust off one of my sandwiches and throw it to the water’s edge. Two mallards dash from the water to battle for it. Sarah laughs.
‘Greedy things.’
‘It’s a hard life for them,’ I say – and then I do laugh, first at my own pomposity, and then at the ducks, which, as they waddle back to the lake, one with crust and one without, are as gravely solemn as they are thoroughly ridiculous.
The penguins in the south were often the same.
I think about Peter’s nature reserve, or rather Peter’s dream of a nature reserve. I remember writing to Kathleen, from the south, toward the end: ‘Get the boy interested in natural history if you can – it is better than games.’ We did it together, as it turned out, of course. And it worked, too.
We leave prints. Wherever we go we leave prints. We left ours on Peter and he will leave his – well, who can say where? Here, certainly, if he creates his reserve. Far beyond here, too, I don’t doubt.
Sarah, too. I suppose she knows this. I suppose knowing this is how she succeeds in ‘looking on the bright side’. She has left a print on me today, a deep one, and I suppose she knows this too. I shall tell her so anyway – but I shan’t tell her it just now, because a water-rail has just crept from the reeds in front of us, and I don’t want to disturb it.
I sit, and Sarah stands, and we watch the bird pick its way through the shallows. It has a red bill and smart grey bars on its flank. I think of Bill Wilson’s unused paintbrushes. I think that it would be a handsome bird to paint.
Wild Ink 