Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'I could cut your hair,' I said, 'and we could set up an automatic-exposure photograph in here -
I mean, to be exactly like them.'
This didn't go down at all well.
'What are you going to cut it with?' she asked. 'That Swiss Army knife you carry around? It's
too blunt to cut the muffins.' It seemed only fair that she should let me do it after I had submitted
like a lamb to the acupuncture needles. As I was thinking about how I might persuade her, she
walked out of the darkroom and into the main part of the hut.
'Do you think they missed Cape Evans when they were back at home?' she called. 'The ones
who made it home, I mean.'
'They all said they did.'
'Do you think we will?'
I looked at her standing there, a stick of chalk poised in mid-air, and I realised how rich our lives
had been at Wooville. As Frank Hurley wrote, 'We had learned to find fullness and contentment in
a life which had stripped us of all the distinctions, baubles and trappings of civilisation.'
'I'm sure I'll never stop missing it,' I said. 'I'll think of it every day, sitting in my flat, looking
out at the traffic. I know nothing will ever be like this again. I'll never feel quite so separated from
my anxieties. It's as though God has given me a gift, once in my life, to step off the planet for two
months and listen to a different music.'
'Doesn't it make you unbearably sad - I mean, that it's over?'
I had to think about that.
'In a strange way, it doesn't. I sort of feel I'm taking it with me - in my heart, if that doesn't
sound naff.'
'What does naff mean?'
'Drippy . . .' That didn't help. 'Mawkishly sentimental.'
She said no more, and I wandered aimlessly around as she painted, imagining them in this place
or that, cosied up in their hut.
I wondered why in the world the bunks were so infernally small, and what had induced them to
bring down a blue-and-white Chinese porcelain decorative bowl. I remembered, too, reading about
a piano they had brought in from the ship (despite the fact that no one could play it) - but this had
vanished.
After some time - it might have been ten minutes - Lucia said, 'No, it doesn't.' I knew imme-
diately she was answering my question about whether what I had said sounded naff. We often had
conversations which included long pauses. We had learnt the rhythm of one another's thoughts.
She too, I knew, was preoccupied with the notion that it was all over. She called out -
'What was that quotation you were telling me last night, you know, about being restored to a
natural state - it was by one of those guys you call Beards?'
Many of our speech idioms had rubbed off - hers on me and mine on her - but I had failed to
introduce 'Beards' as a term one could use generically, without qualification.
'It was by Reinhold Messner,' I said. 'The greatest mountaineer alive. When he was down here,
slogging across the plateau, he wrote, “It seemed to me as if I were restored to that time and that
state when nature alone was God.”'
