The Ice: A gripping thriller for our times from the Bailey’s shortlisted author of The Bees. Laline Paull
friend,’ Tom said. ‘A brilliant woman.’
The girl’s smile lit her up. ‘Then I don’t mind at all.’
Sean gazed at her until Tom punched him lightly on the shoulder.
‘Let me know how much they hated me.’
Sean watched them disappear out onto the street, and into their shared afternoon. He found himself alone, quite drunk and acutely bereft.
The lovely girl was young enough to be Tom’s daughter, if he’d had one. This brought the image of his own sharply to Sean’s mind. Rosie, the angry sad child who could not understand how her father needed to feel like a man more than a husband. How her mother had changed into a woman who saw him as he really was, instead of the hero he wanted to be.
Sean knew he was drunk, but maybe that was the best way to tell Rosie how he felt. He wanted to say sorry, for so much. There at the bar he took out his phone. The call went straight through to her voicemail. At least it didn’t ring several times, as often happened, before going dead. That meant she knew it was him, and didn’t want to talk. This time, she was just busy. Then he called Martine, and the same thing happened.
Why did they not pick up? Sean left his pint unfinished. Only sad old men drank pints on their own in daylight. Tom had done this to him.
A bright burst of laughter seemed aimed at him and he turned. Two girls sat at a corner table, they looked away when he caught their eye – but not before flashing him a quick smile. He did not know what to do with himself; it was that awkward time when the pub was just filling up with the early after-work crowd, the low earners who couldn’t wait to get away. One minute he was enjoying a liberating freedom with Tom, drinking pints in an unfashionable pub at the hour they felt like doing it – and the next he was beached on the shores of other people’s lives – like some loser.
The girls sent arcs of laughter up through the air, they were lassoing him and drawing him over, they wanted to play. He looked in the mirror behind the bar, where he could see them angling their thighs towards him, rearranging their shiny hanks of hair.
Before he left, he spoke to the barman and bought a bottle of champagne to be sent over when he’d gone. Their faces fell as he went out, and he felt a grim satisfaction that he had not fallen for it, drunk as he was. He could have gone over and within a couple of drinks – maybe not even that – adjourned to somewhere more comfortable. A hotel. An hotel. He had learned to always use that weirdness, to demonstrate his adherence to the right set of rules. Inviting people for ‘a kitchen supper’, never ‘dinner’. Repeating ‘how do you do,’ instead of ever answering the question. In English society, nobody cared – that was something he learned too – and they would be horrified if you told them. But they always cared that you were rich.
Standing outside, Sean watched the girls receive the champagne. They were suitably over-excited and he drew back as they scanned the pub for him. What a strange thing to have done. It gave him no pleasure, he was just acting out the anxiety of waiting, of being compared and judged after the presentation. He should have just said that to Tom, but he’d been too busy struggling with the feeling of inadequacy because of how brilliant Tom had been. If they’d only had longer, and more to drink, he would have blurted it all out, they could have talked again like they used to – he could have told him about how it had gone wrong with Gail. Tom was kind, he was always kind, he would have known what to say. Instead, he’d gone off with that girl, who did look like a young Ruth. Tom had fucked things up too. Sean wasn’t the only one.
He slammed into the wall of the pub, drunker than he’d thought. When he and Tom had been drinking together, he’d been happy in a way he had forgotten, relaxing into that long-lost feeling of comradeship and solidarity. Only now did he realise he’d been looking forward to talking about their Greenland trip again, to indulging in a full-blown nostalgia fest, to drinking more, to calling Martine drunkenly to say he was having dinner – supper – with Tom, that it didn’t fucking matter what happened with the Midgard deal, at least they’d reconnected.
He peered through the pub window. To feel so disappointed was pathetic. Nostalgia was for people whose lives were over. Tom had a date, and those girls in there had been joined by two meaty-looking boyfriends. Sean watched some animated talk about the bottle and the boys jerked their necks and squared their shoulders in ritual male display for the rich sod who’d undercut them.
Aimlessly drunk, emotionally disorderly, he decided to clear his head and walk back to Devon Square through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, in the hope of seeing the cavalry.
But it was too late in the day for the horses, and Sean sat on a bench with a coffee from one of the kiosks, trying to sober up. Vodka he could skilfully calibrate, but pints of beer somehow sidestepped that control and made him too emotional. From deciding as he walked away from the pub that he would park the whole Greenland nostalgia trip, he was now flooding with memories of it. He’d been there on three separate expeditions, the first with Tom, on the Lost Explorers’ Expedition when they were twenty. They had been racing partners on the ten-dog sled, and both had imagined that reading about it was tantamount to expertise. They had made complete fools of themselves and had never had a better time. The next couple of times had been for Kingsmith, investigating some mining tender that came to nothing; he had spent time in the capital Nuuk – but it had still been Greenland, still the Arctic.
The first time was the best, despite their incompetence. Because of it, perhaps. He and Tom sweating and stumbling about in the snow, desperately trying to wrestle ten dogs into their harnesses, the air snapping and flashing with the frenzy of excited barking, the dogs fully aware they had novices to deal with. One by one they got them in, resorting to both of them grabbing one dog and managing at last to work out which leg went through which bit of harness – exhausted before they even set off, but the dogs howling and leaping with the thrill of it, as if they’d never done it before either.
It was a shock when his phone rang, in Hyde Park. It was Mogens Hadbold, and he had good news.
One is often asked what is the attraction and what are the joys of Polar exploration. The answer is – Adventure – going where man has never gone before. Achievement – discovering something of value to mankind, such as the whale-fishery of South Georgia; or ramming your way through ice or any difficulties under steam or sail. The wonderful pure beauty of these regions, the healthy invigorating life; and last but not least – comradeship – the comradeship of men. Men who fight alongside you, toil with you, laugh with you, and chaff you. Pals who rack their brains for abuse and epithets to hurl at each other, and who fight for their absent chums. Pals who stand by each other through thick and thin; who share trials, hardships, joys, dangers and food, and are determined, at all hazards, to ‘see it through’ together. For such men you feel a great affection, and the results are teamwork and loyalty of the finest, highest quality, with joy of memory that never fades away.
Under Sail in the Frozen North: The Log of the 1926 British Arctic Expedition (1927)
Frank Arthur Worsley
From his park bench, Sean sent emails to Kingsmith, Radiance and Tom. He phoned Martine and said he would be over soon, then he called Gail, to say he wouldn’t. He told her the news and first she congratulated him then asked for a divorce. She knew that Martine was part of the consortium and not one of his silly little girls, and she understood that now his relationship with her would become paramount. Gail wanted the dignity of immediate separation. She told him her lawyer’s name and hung up. Sean was shocked that she was so prepared.
When he arrived at Martine’s apartment she had a spare key and a bottle of chilled Krug waiting. This was the moment they had imagined, and though he enjoyed seeing her blaze with their triumph, he felt oddly