When Nights Were Cold Read Online Free Page B

clumps. The ponies and dogs began to fight, biting necks and ears, tossing and yowling. The men cried out and the car rolled off the deck and fell through a hole in a slab of ice.
    But the ship must be strong because Shackleton intended to reach the Pole this time. My father, who had been speaking to his friends at the Royal Geographical Society, said that the route to the Pole belonged to Scott and that Shackleton would have to keep off Scott’s turf. I said that I didn’t think they would find much turf at the South Pole. He roared: He’s not a naval man. He’ll never succeed, the wretched scoundrel, asking all and sundry to fund him on this hasty escapade.
    I could hear him now, in the drawing room with our neighbour Mr Kenny, shouting about the scandalous behaviour of a shopman from our street who had done something terrible, but I could not catch what it was.
    â€˜Disgraceful behaviour.’ Mr Kenny relished the words. ‘I hope there’s a brother who can chase him and shoot him.’
    â€˜I’ve a good mind to write to The Times on this very point.’
    He was always writing letters to the newspapers and sometimes they were published and he read them aloud to us at breakfast.
    I shut my bedroom door and pulled my pillow around my ears. I wanted Shackleton to succeed but how would he afford it? Could one just write to people and ask them for hundreds of pounds? Wouldn’t they think it rude? It seemed a terrible thing to have to do for such an important expedition. Yet people were giving him funds and expecting him to pay them back when he returned. How would they know that he had the money? What if, like Father, he was injured and wouldn’t be able to work? Father was wealthy because he had money from his father. He never had to write and ask a stranger for help.
    I was coming to the end of my school years. I was trying to accept the prospect of a life at home like Catherine’s, then perhaps marriage. It depressed me, for I knew it was all wrong and not the life I felt sure I was supposed to have, but my parents would never change their minds about university and work. How could I learn anything from the explorers when they never had to contend with such nonsense?
    It was three years since Catherine should have gone to college. She no longer took piano lessons. She played in the evenings, still, as Father demanded it, but with a different kind of fervour. Her music was less precise. She was careless in difficult technical passages. She rarely bothered to learn new music, not with the hours of work and pencil scratching of before, but made lazy, haphazard attempts at pieces she had already studied. During the daytime she helped Mother run the house and she spent hours on her needlework, making rag dolls in bright dresses for the church bazaars. She never complained but she hardly spoke to me nowadays. I had annoyed her by continuing to mention the Royal College and all the things she might still do, if only she would try. She told me she never wished to speak of it again and that I had better worry about my own life for a change for I was hardly doing anything so extraordinary.
    I still worried about her.
    For the first two years after leaving school, Catherine had received invitations to dances and parties. She always declined. Neighbours invited her to give recitals, but she said that she no longer had the nerve to play to an audience. She had one or two friends from her schooldays and, though they paid occasional visits, Catherine rarely left the house except to run errands. The friends and invitations stopped coming and Catherine seemed relieved. When he was well enough, Father took her to recitals at Bechstein Hall, but he was embarrassed by his cough and sometimes spent most of the concert waiting in the lobby while Catherine listened to the music alone.
    â€˜I don’t know about life outside the house,’ she said to Mother. ‘It doesn’t seem to suit me