among the East End poor, junk-food wrappers, discarded syringes, a TV playing soaps. The dice were two metres high, the Community Chest cards were lowered in place by crane, the dog-eared banknotes made of plywood were in tottering 25-metre piles on the grass. In all, an indictment, it was supposed, of a money-obsessed culture. Do Not Pass Go was celebrated, reviled, photographed from the air by passengers on their descent into Heathrow. Children liked stampeding across the board in herds and crawling inside the top-hat token. The makers of the game began a legal case, which they dropped in the face of public derision and rising sales. A local-business association on the Old Kent Road also brought a case, or said it would, and nothing was heard.
Polkinghorne’s disembodied smile presided over Beard’s melancholic reflections on the end of his marriage. He experienced a genial blend of sadness, anger, nostalgia (those early months were bliss), and a warm, self-forgiving sense of failure. And repetition. Five was enough. He would never go through this again, and with that thought came the familiar recognition of his new freedom. When matters were settled, he would buy a small London flat, he would be responsible only for himself, he would guard ferociously his independence and cure himself of this strange lifelong habit of marriage. It was lovers he needed, not wives.
Passively, he let himself be processed through Oslo, then Trondheim. The flight to Longyearbyen was delayed by two and a half hours, during which he sat in a plastic moulded chair and read the Herald Tribune with total concentration and no recall. It was three in the morning when his taxi stopped by giant mounds of snow outside his hotel. He had not eaten in hours. Dressed in sweater, anorak and long johns, he lay in bed, hemmed in on three sides by chunky wooden beams, and ate all the salted snacks in the minibar, and then all the sugary snacks, and when he was woken by reception at eight the following morning to be told that everyone was waiting for him downstairs, the wrapper of a Mars bar was still folded in his fist.
His immediate need was to satisfy his thirst, but the water from the tap on his basin was so intensely cold, so fiery on the lips and he drank so deeply that he developed shooting pains in his face and temples that had not receded by the time he descended with his luggage, still dazed from lack of sleep, to the lobby to meet his group – already breakfasted, already boisterous, already zipping themselves into their special-issue snowmobile suits. In the lobby’s dim solar-powered light and the press of overdressed bodies he did not catch sight of Stella Polkinghorne. Yes, it came back to him now, the manic larkiness of the English in large groups. From different corners of the crowded space came abrupt shouts of individual laughter and cackles in unison. And it was eight twenty in the morning. Forcing a smile, pretending gamely not to be oppressed, he shook many hands, was told many names and remembered no one because his thoughts were on the coffee he was too late for. How could he start his day? The urn was empty, the breakfast table was being cleared away by a girl who did not speak English, did not even understand the planetary word ‘coffee’, even when pronounced loudly, and now one of the organisers, a great elk of a man called Jan, was telling him it was too late for coffee and was guiding him towards his very own pile of outer clothing and saying he must hurry, a snowstorm was expected within two hours and the group needed to get going.
The place was emptying, and he was not ready. Someone very old with snow in his beard and a damp, unlit cigarette on his lower lip came in muttering ill-temperedly, snatched Beard’s bag, took it out to a sledge hitched to a snowmobile and drove off. Both the waitress and Jan had disappeared, and Beard was the only person in the lobby. This was a long-forgotten experience from his schooldays, not only being late, but feeling ignorant and incompetent and wretched, with everyone else mysteriously in the know, as though in league against him. Fatso Beard, always last, useless at team games. With that memory came added clumsiness and indecision. Although he was dressed in ski clothes of many layers, he was expected to climb inside this extra skin, even to wear his own boots inside another pair. There were inner gloves and giant outer gloves, a heavy balaclava made of carpet underlay to wear over his own, and goggles, and a motorcycle helmet.
He got into the suit – it must have weighed twenty pounds – put on the dusty balaclava, squeezed his head into the helmet, put on the inner and outer gloves, then realised that he would not be able to put on the goggles while wearing the gloves, took off the gloves, clamped on the goggles, put on the inner and outer gloves, then remembered that his own ski goggles and gloves, hip flask and stick of lipsalve on the seat next to him would need to be stowed. He took off the inner and outer gloves, put his stuff in a pocket inside his jacket after much struggling with the zip of the outer suit, put on the inner and outer gloves again and found that in the damp warm air of the lobby, and with his own impatient perspiring, his goggles were fogging up. Hot and tired, an unpleasant combination, he stood suddenly in exasperation, turned and collided with a beam or a column, he couldn’t see which, with a massive cracking sound. How fortunate it was that the Nobel laureate was wearing a helmet. No damage to his skull, but there was now a diagonal crack across the left eyepiece of his goggles, an almost straight line that refracted and diffused the low yellow light in the lobby. To remove the helmet, balaclava and goggles and wipe the condensation from them he had to remove all four gloves, and now that his hands were sweating these items were not so easy to dislodge. Once the goggles were off, it was straightforward enough to bring them to the almost-cleared breakfast table and take a crumpled paper napkin, used, but not much used, to polish the lens. Perhaps it was butter, perhaps it was porridge or marmalade that smeared the already scratched plastic, but at least the condensation was off, and it was relatively simple, after replacing the balaclava, to secure the goggles around the helmet and lower it over his head and put on all four gloves and stand, ready at last to face the elements.
His vision was much restricted by the new breakfast coating, otherwise he would have seen the boots earlier lying on their sides under his chair. Off with the gloves then – he was not going to lose his temper – and then, after some fiddling with the laces, he decided he would see better without the goggles. Clear sight confirmed that the boots were far too small, by at least three sizes, and there was some relief in knowing that not all the incompetence was his own. But he was game, and thought he would give it one last try, and that was how Jan, entering the lobby with a blast of icy air, found him, trying to push his foot in its hiking boot into a fur-lined snow shoe.
‘My God, you thick or which?’
The giant elk man kneeled before him and with impatient tugs removed his hiking boots, tied the laces together and slung the pair around Beard’s neck.
‘Now try.’
His feet slid in, Jan secured the laces at speed and stood.
‘Come on, man. Let’s go!’
Possibly it was his embarrassment that helped fog up the goggles again, but he had a pretty good idea of the direction of the door, and he had the rough outline of Jan’s shoulder to guide him.
‘You drive a snowmobile before?’
‘Of course,’ he lied.
‘Good good. I want to catch the others.’
‘How far is it to the ship?’
‘One hundred fifteen kilometres.’
When they stepped out, the wind slapped his face, no less hard than Tarpin had, and with the same stinging aftermath. The condensation inside his goggles froze instantly but for a small patch, through the marmalade veneer of which he could just make out Jan’s form retreating along a path cut through the deep snow that wound between the shapes of buildings. After ten minutes they arrived at the edge of the settlement before a vast white plain that stretched away into a mist. It may have been an airfield, for there was an orange windsock nearby straining in the horizontal position. Parked by a ditch were two snowmobiles, noisily pumping out a blue- black mist of their own.
‘I follow you,’ Jan said. ‘Minimum fifty kilometres an hour if we want to arrive before the storm. OK?’
‘OK.’
But it was not OK. The wind was strong and they would be driving straight into it. Deep inside his helmet, the tips of his ears were already numb, and so were the tip of his nose and his toes. To see he was obliged to tilt his head and angle his sightline through a diminishing area of semi-clarity, avoiding at the same time the illuminated crack over his left eye. But all this was incidental, blindness and pain he could live with. A more urgent problem was oppressing him as he turned towards his snowmobile. In his hurry and thick-headedness that morning, he had omitted all the usual routines. He had not shaved or washed and, except to drink a pint of freezing water, had not set foot inside the bathroom. Then he had hurried out of the room with his bag. Now it was minus twenty-six, wind force five, they were pressed for time, a storm was looming, Jan was already astride
