Ice letters, p.1
Ice Letters, page 1
About the Book
A First World War novel of love, peace, violence and Antarctica
Adelaide, 1916, and Dora Somerville grieves for her brother, Edgar, killed in France. In the course of an oppressively hot summer, she decides to abandon her pacifist beliefs and embrace violence as a means to end the Great War.
In his printing shop, her lover, Daniel Bone, also makes a momentous decision. He can no longer face the constant pressure to fight in the war – he will join an Antarctic expedition and abandon Australia, leaving Dora behind. However, the peace Daniel seeks eludes him when he is caught up in a crisis in the icy wilderness as the men find themselves under attack.
When the lovers parted, they had agreed to write to one another, although they knew the letters would never be sent. Thousands of miles apart, their passion grows as the decisions they have made imperil them both.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright Notice
To Fergus
one
AFTER MY BROTHER WAS KILLED, I received a letter from his friend Tom Holloway, about how Edgar died. For a long time, I carried this letter everywhere with me, in a bag or a pocket. I took it out every now and again in odd places and read it to myself. Afterwards, I would hold the letter, thinking and thinking, but I never understood what I was feeling. There was no word for it, that drilling into the chest, that pain. Over time the letter became stained and tattered. I was afraid of losing it altogether so I put it under the glass of my dressing table. I placed the letter so that it was open; that way, I could read it whenever I wanted to but it would still be protected. The story of my brother lay there, under the glass, captured at the moment between life and death.
This is that letter.
My Dear Dora,
Thank you for writing to me. I am sorry about the delay. It must be two or three months since you wrote to me. I have agonised about how to answer your letter. Being laid up gives you too much time to think somehow. You have said that you want to know the truth about Edgar’s death. I suppose you received the standard official lie: he died instantly with no pain etc. All the letters say that, of course. I am sure you have already guessed it.
To tell the truth, I was glad to get your letter. I have carried this terrible burden since that day and in a way I was relieved when I read what you wanted. To tell this to another person is a great relief to me. I will not bother to try to dissuade you from knowing what you want to know. Everyone should know this, every man, woman and child alive should know what I know. I hope it reaches you intact. I have sent it out in the care of a friend instead of by official post.
Here it is:
We were outside what had once been the French village of Pozieres, now a pile of twisted rubble; it was part of the Somme offensive. The fighting had been fierce. Lots of fire on both sides with no ground won or lost. It was about seven o’clock in the morning, I think. Edgar was killed by an exploding shell. It landed near his position. There was nowhere for him to get out of the way. Others were killed too in the narrowness of the trench but Edgar took the full impact of the fire. We tried to extinguish the flames with blankets. Buckets of water were pretty scarce. His whole body had burst into flames. The flesh burned as he died. Nothing was more terrible than his screams. I still hear them, in dreams, or in the distance when I am awake. I believe that I shall hear them forever.
I think that you will hate me now for what I have told you. Please forgive me. Please find it in your heart to one day forgive me.
Yours, Tom Holloway.
1 November, 1916.
two
WHEN THE TELEGRAM BOY KNOCKED loudly on the door, bringing the telegram which would tell her of the death of her brother, Dora was in the back yard, pretending to garden. Really, it was too hot to be outside at that hour of the day but there were many times when she could not bear to be inside the house. Many hours when the house seemed no longer to be her home but a dark forest of past memory and present absence. The place was too big for her. She was afraid sometimes to stand in one of the large rooms and smell familiar smells and touch objects she knew well enough to find in the dark. Inside the house, she felt she was still a child, pretending to be grown up.
Sometimes she wished she did not live alone. After Edgar died, her mother’s younger sister wrote from Sydney to assure Dora that she and various cousins would be visiting very soon, but the arrangements never materialised. Aunt Mabel was both indolent and delicate, with many daughters and a rich husband. She continued to write now and again, enquiring after Dora’s health, and evidently thought that sufficient to discharge her duties. Of her father’s brothers, Dora knew little. The oldest brother, Nathaniel, had been involved in some embarrassment over money and had fled to America before Dora was born. The youngest, Timothy, was a restless man, always travelling. When they wrote to tell him that his brother, Dora’s father, had died, the letter was returned unopened. He had moved on from the last address they had.
Dora did not feel so alone in the garden; it had been her father’s place of peace, where he trowelled away Sunday afternoons, forgetting the cares of his work. He planted hundreds of bulbs which even now, after his death, emerged through the seasons, poking green shoots out of the brown earth. Sometimes, when she was a child, her father would allow his young daughter to make a small posy of jonquils or daffodils which she would carry carefully into the house in her child’s hands and her mother would put them in water in an old jam jar on the kitchen table.
Dora had not inherited her father’s gift for cultivation. Her gardening was haphazard. She hacked at roses and pulled weeds from the vegetable plot which was running feral with every sunny day, seeding and reseeding. But she kept gardening, as a way of escape from the war and the tyranny of waiting for news from far away. In the farthest corner of the yard, beyond even the wild vegetables, stood an old chicken coop long abandoned. Dora had been thinking of getting a rooster and some hens. She imagined them there, strutting about, warm and alive, their bird sounds breaking the silence of her days.
When she heard the telegram boy knocking, Dora stood up and wiped her hands on her apron. As she walked into the house, she pulled the apron off and threw it on a chair. She was still thinking about her hens; their eggs would be brown and smooth, with dark yellow yolks. Light flowed into the hallway through the stained glass around the door. She saw the outline of the boy’s hat through these pieces of window and stopped. The boy knocked again more loudly. The door seemed to shake. The hat was transfixed in her mind. She felt it was death there, death waiting beyond the door. Strange thoughts filled her head. Why hadn’t he rung the bell? Why was he knocking, almost beating down the door? Had he rung and she didn’t hear out in the garden? After a time, she did not know how long, Dora walked forward and opened the door. Her heart was pounding and full of dread, fearing what the message would be and knowing at the same time. Her hands trembled as she struggled with the handle, wrenching the front door open at last. She hesitated for a second time, staring at the boy through the screen door in a kind of silent horror, the mesh between them like a net across time until one of them pulled open the screen, breaching this last barrier. Dora could not remember whether it was her or the boy who had done it. She stood there, twitching as if caught naked in the light of the day. Suddenly reaching out, she snatched the envelope from the boy’s hand and ripped it open. Of course she knew what would be written there; they both did. Opening the envelope was just part of the ritual. Her stomach turned over, a strange sensation of horror and relief as when the trap door opens under the feet of the condemned man.
Dora began to laugh. The laughter started as soon as she read the message. The first sound was a deep, rough chortle from low down in her slight frame. It rushed up like a great roar throug h her stomach and into her throat, forcing itself out between her jaws. The pressure of this first laugh coming out was so great, she thought her lungs might burst and scatter into a thousand fleshy pieces. Her young face contorted violently like Indian rubber as she sucked in huge gulps of air and expelled them in great rolling peals until she seemed to be nothing but a mouth with endless teeth, her eyes shrinking to dark slits in her face. Her head felt as if it might crack.
What’s wrong with me? Why am I doing this?
But she could not stop.
When she started laughing, she saw the telegram boy step back from the shadow of the doorway into the sunlight of the verandah, shocked by her reaction. Nobody laughed at his telegrams. They were nearly always about death or serious injury; sometimes about those who were missing, the ‘presumed dead’ who continued to exist in a sepia-coloured suspension until their bodies might be found. A handful of words on yellow paper had broken others, even grown men, crumbling under the news of the death of an only son. But her laughter, it was like something dirty and shameful. The boy wanted to get away.
Finally, Dora collapsed on the hallway rug. She lay on the floor until she was calm, feeling her heart pounding under her ribs. She put her hands over her face covering it completely as if to reshape her features into something more appropriate, like grief. Then she sat up and slowly got to her feet. She was alone; the telegram boy had already fled in horror.
Later, when she was quieter, Dora cried and for days after she was haunted by memories, not so much of her brother as a man but as a child. She would imagine that she saw him everywhere in the street, in shops, on trams. She pushed her way through crowds and stared into the faces of children just to be sure that it wasn’t him. Dora was puzzled at first as to why she sought the child Edgar and not the man. But they had been closest as children and like branches from the same fork of the tree they had grown further apart as they reached adulthood. As Edgar grew up, he moved into an adult world of men from which she was excluded. He treated her differently, with a condescension which infuriated her.
After the death of their father, he had managed all the financial affairs for herself and her mother and somehow this authority made him even more distant from her. During this time, right at the very beginning of the war, their mother began to die. She lay in her bed, shrinking away, becoming transparent with grief and sickness until, at the end, she was little more than a shadow on the sheets. Dora nursed her mother and managed the house. She hated having to ask Edgar for money, hated the way he inspected the household bills and questioned her about them. His arrogance rubbed against the small nugget of free will inside of her, and she began to question him, this grown-up Edgar who was so different from her quiet, scholarly father. They had argued terribly about the war. Dora felt strongly that she could not support Australia’s involvement in such a battle. She saw only a greedy struggle between old men. Edgar saw right and principle. He believed deeply in the bonds of Empire. From somewhere inside her heart, Dora had found the strength to defy him, surprising even herself.
At first Dora did not know what to do. She was lonely in her defiance, lonely because all the arguing created a great distance between brother and sister. Some days they barely spoke to one another. She decided to begin, as she always did with her life’s problems and worries, by reading. It was just by chance that she took the pamphlet. She was walking back from the State Library, her book bag heavy on her shoulder. Passing the big department store, she was suddenly caught up in the bustle of shoppers as they poured out into the street and swarmed towards trains and trams. It was late, she realised, Edgar would be wondering about his tea. She stopped for a moment to adjust her burden. There was a woman standing nearby, at the store’s grand entrance. She was handing out pieces of paper which so few people accepted that Dora felt sorry for her. She went over and took one from her hand.
Thank you.
‘Don’t read that rubbish, love. Should be a hanging offence.’
A stout man in a crumpled suit almost pushed Dora out of the way as he passed by. Dora stared down at the pamphlet, reading it as she walked along.
She went to her first pacifist rally out of curiosity and the fire of it surprised her. She was welcomed and called ‘sister’. Perhaps it was the friendship that she loved the most, the generosity that was like the warm embrace of the sea. Dora realised there was a whole world who thought as she did. Amidst the cheering and the singing, she felt as if she had woken from a trance. Dora began to attend every anti-war meeting she could. She devoured books and articles, and listened to speakers on the street corner and in halls and rooms. She filled her days with meetings and rallies, signing her name to countless petitions. When she stood with others to welcome Adela Pankhurst, she believed she was at last among her own kind of people. But all around her, the nation gathered itself for war as if taking in a great breath.
Edgar signed up without telling her. He came home from the recruiting station with some of his mates. They were all beaming, a little drunk after toasting the great adventure. They brought more drink with them and continued celebrating, laughing and singing loudly, drunkenly flirting with Dora. There was much back slapping. After his friends had gone, Dora and Edgar stood alone in the sitting room, watching each other warily. There was a strong smell of beer and whisky and the ashtrays overflowed, spilling tobacco remnants onto the carpet. Empty glasses and bottles stood in puddles on the sideboard, leaving sticky rings on the wood. The air in the room was stale. Outside, it was utterly dark.
‘How could you, Edgar?’ Dora had asked. ‘How could you do it without letting me know? You might have told me first. You might have warned me. It’s not fair.’
‘It’s done. I’m going, Dorothea. That’s it.’
He didn’t even bother to make an argument with her about it; perhaps he was too drunk to trust himself. He picked up the day’s paper where it lay on the table and walked off into his bedroom, slamming the door. Dora did not follow him but went to her own room to think. She would clean up in the morning. She could not sleep but lay awake most of the night, riding an ocean of dread.
They had struggled through the weeks before he went. Both were trying to make some effort to be civil. They had only each other in the world after all. Perhaps that knowledge continued to bind them together. It hurt Dora to think about it now, that coldness between brother and sister.
As for her laughter over the telegram, it had always been like this for her, even when Dora was a little girl and had been scolded for giggling during funerals. The severest despair always made her laugh and she did not know why. She had never been able to tell anyone about this strange behaviour; she had only ever told Daniel Bone, the man she loved. She went to see him soon after she received the telegram, once she was composed, could walk in the street, negotiate trams, congress with others. He was at work in his printing business. She burst in on him when he was speaking to a customer but he saw her face and knew what had happened. She was still clutching the telegram, crushed in her hand. She had told him everything, even about the laughter.
‘Excess of joy weeps, excess of sorrow laughs,’ he had murmured as he wrapped her in his arms.
Dora nodded; she had read those words somewhere.
three
DORA LEFT THE ROOM QUICKLY, shutting the door firmly behind her as she went out onto the small landing. The floorboards did not creak under her feet. She was a light-framed young woman, with a pale beauty, small and dainty as a sparrow. In three strides she was at the top of the stairs, ready to go down. There she stopped, even though she knew she was late for the meeting and stopping would make her later still. She looked back towards the room which was in complete darkness, no light showing under the closed door. There was only one room in the upper storey of her house. It was a kind of sitting room wedged up under the roof space, with a raked ceiling.
