Our search finally yielded, among wine bars fretful to parasite upon the flanks of the City Airport, an old dockers’ pub, an unrestored end-of-terrace barrack. The ham rolls were reassuringly authentic: crusted in oven-tanned plaster of Paris, concealing a pink slick of reconstituted animal fat. The Guinness was warm and slightly soapy. The wallpaper had not been pasted to the walclass="underline" it had grown like a fungus. And was growing still.
The only other customer, sitting under a photograph of the wreck of the Albion, was Henry Milditch. They fitted so well together, these blatant props, that they might have been artfully posed by the management in a patriotic tableau; an advertisement for extra-strong cough drops. Milditch was dressed like a seafaring man. He was bearded, grizzled, red. I could have sworn he was suffering from frostbite. He blew on clenched hands: his eyes narrowed to menacing slits against the glare of sunlight on pack-ice.
‘What’ll you have, boys?’ Milditch offered, with unprecedented generosity. ‘I’ve landed a beauty here. Polar trek across the Royal Victoria: two hours a day, three days a week. Five hundred notes in the hand. Can’t be bad. And a possible “voice over” if the “South Bank Show” bites on Joblard. Catling’s been dropped, or there’d be a clash of chalk-stripes with Melvyn that would devastate the horizontal hold. It was no contest, I walked the audition. I still had the costume I’d liberated from the tele in Greenland; I thought it would come in handy for winter mornings down the Lane. It’s promotion for Milditch, boys. I’ve made it from base-camp gopher to Captain Oates. I was the only applicant with his own gear. So it’s hard tack and horsemeat all the way to Christmas.’
It made me shiver talking to him. We dosed the shakes with remedial tots of rum. Milditch had even taken to a pipe. He poked and scraped, puffed out contemplative streams of blue smoke; hummed the odd Music Hall chorus. He offered to take us with him on to the Great Ice Barrier. We could participate in the ultimate bulldog fantasy.
The broken-backed Albion hung above us, trapped and framed (a crocodile trophy), as we killed another bottle — holding our wake while we were still around to enjoy it. Royalty fanciers on overcrowded and inadequate piers had been swept away in the tidal wash of the Albion’s launch. Respectfully dressed to the nines, they drowned where they waved. Their sacrifice authenticating the loss of the vessel. They were ‘justified’ when their small tragedy afforded the opportunity for some strikingly purple cadenzas in the national press.
Arm in arm, wrapped in a shaggy cloak of spirits, we staggered up the slope towards the City Airport; battling through a whiteout of sugar-fires, the darkness at noon, the huskies howling in their quarantine cages.
IX
The naked hubris of the Consort’s Monument was startling: a scaffolded Colossus, an Ozymandias touting for copy from a gossip-column Shelly. The stack, knitted in coloured searchlight beams, could achieve its apotheosis only as a ruin, a Planet of the Apes arm, lofted from future sands for the gimcrack inspiration of stoned romantic poets.
Chained barges were linked across the King George V dock. Choppers worried and swooped. Marksmen crouched on roof tops. Dogs sniffed for plastic explosives and cannabis. (That Janus-headed horror of drug-crazed bombers!) A babble-speak of spooks licking their own gloves. Then the Widow herself clattered on sawn-off stilts into a hail of exploding flashbulbs. She was padded like a Dallas Cowboy; smoke-blue, she chicken-danced towards a nest of microphones. Her head was unnaturally tilted (as if it had been wrongly assembled after a motorway pile-up), but her hair was obedient. A swift, over-rehearsed smile preceded the ankle-stamping homily. ‘And you know… you know you know you know.’ The blade-shredded acoustics fed her catchphrases back into the prompt machines, to blare in frantic reverb from speakers which had been hung (like so many skulls) around the perimeter fence for the benefit of the uninvited masses.
‘I can only echo the words… the words the words the words,’ she uncurled a fleshy white arm, like Gypsy Rose Lee about to peel a long black evening glove, ‘of Captain Robert… Robert… Falcon Scott. “For God’s sake look after… after after… our people… people people.” That has always been… been… and remains remains… our first principle. Looking after our own people.’
Over at the Victoria Dock they were testing the strength of the ice by airlifting the Royal Vegan. The Widow had timed her oration to the second, the recorded applause would steal his thunder, and neutralize any potential whingeing about ‘traditional values’ and amateur heroics, the boy-scout stuff. Anyway, why dig up that polar fiasco? Didn’t the bloody man fail, beaten by a gang of Viking lager louts? And what had we salvaged of the fabulous mineral wealth of the continent, to say nothing of the buried occult deposits, the blue hollows guarding the Spear of Destiny? Sod all, that’s what. Enough ground for a five-a-side football pitch.
A sad knot of anorak-draped proles had been bussed in from outlying geriatric hospitals and day centres to stand at the dock-side, waving-by-numbers at the overalled maintenance workers; while being deafened by the thud of ice-making machinery, the sinister hum of Joblard’s privately generated magnetic field, and the low-level raids of helicopter gunships. A day to remember. Or so they were told.
Milditch ushered us towards the Customs Sheds where my old friend the sculptor, S. L. Joblard, was mumbling his final instructions to his regular wild bunch of razor-cropped assassins. These were revealed, on closer acquaintance, as a trio of mild-mannered, obediently impoverished art students, who happened to look like warders from a Hogarthian asylum. Joblard would lead us in our push on the Pole. There was no difficulty about our joining the team. We were winched into sets of bloodstained and stinking parkas, balaclavas, vast gloves on which the fur was still growing. Then we were given a swift onceover by Make-up.
‘We’ll have to do something about the suntan, lovey,’ Make-up trilled, patting Sonny down with arsenic powder and a copydex laminate. ‘Very persistent, isn’t it?’ Stone-faced, we received our quota of lip sores, blains, blisters, tissue trauma, and rime-spiked dogfur fringes. We staggered out on to the rink like tipsy rejects from a VD clinic. Milditch, the old pro, leant contentedly on a stick; puffing at his pipe, absorbed in a suitably jaunty leitmotif from his headset: Blood on the Tracks. The familiar sage-spiced odour of the herb calmed us.
Joblard had retreated into himself: his social persona had shifted to something unformed and private. It was like watching a detailed reflection drain from a mirror. Joblard no longer reacted to external stimuli. He was quite alone. The polar pantomime meant nothing to him: a convenient method of funding some arcane and potentially unstable ritual. His motives were also opaque. They were not satiric, nor political. He flattered nobody and wanted nothing in return for his efforts. He made no boasts. He listened intently for the return of some sound he had initiated in a previous existence.
It struck me that Joblard had reversed Stevenson’s polarity: Hyde had succeeded in manufacturing his own doctor, in the form of Professor Catling. This mask of respectability granted him leave to slip the bear from its chain.
We were undistinguished extras. Joblard would soon break away from our plodding troop of bogus adventurers and strike into the solitary distance, bent against the storm of shredded asbestos that his assistants tipped over the propellers of the wind machine. He would ‘tap’ the ice floor, searching for a spirit hidden within a secret hermetic chamber, a presence of ‘concerned agile violence’. He would cast the moon in lead; deliberately inverting the process and meaning of alchemy. He would make a necessary sacrifice. I only hoped that we were not a part of it.