style="font-size:15px;"> ‘And a married man, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘You’re not mistaken. Three years ago when I first came up north with Eric and the crew from Bellwood College, he was recently divorced, without a good word to say for his ex-wife, and hot on my trail. The next summer he came, a newly-wed, but still on my case. Guess who he’d just married?’
‘Phillip Loew’s mother, I gather.’
‘Yes, but whom do you suppose he had divorced just the year before?’
Simon shook his head.
‘Phillip’s mother.’
‘Are you saying he remarried the same woman?’
‘Precisely. And Phillip was furious, especially when he caught Eric prowling around me.’
‘I’m not surprised. You’d think with the son right at his elbow, Eric could’ve controlled himself.’
‘Well, he didn’t, and his wife never heard anything about it since Phillip didn’t live to tell the tale.’
‘It’s sad the baggage of civilization has to come up here with us,’ Simon mused.
As she picked up the gear to move on to the next pond, Anne agreed wholeheartedly.
Wearily Tony plunked his corer down on the frozen terrain. These northern trips used to be the highlight of his year but this time it was torture. But then life itself was torture of late. He groaned aloud, longing for what he considered the innocence of his post-doctoral days.
His mind’s eye saw Anne as he had first seen her, one brilliant autumn day at Hemlow College. A colleague had pointed her out where she sat, eating her lunch under a golden beech in the arboretum. Her simple white dress had been spread out around her, making a base for her graceful upper body and accentuating her pale skin and gleaming blonde hair. It had taken him a year’s allotment of nerve to go up and introduce himself, but he needn’t have worried; she was the friendliest, least critical person he’d ever met. He thought she was beautiful.
Very easily they had become a ‘couple’, informally at first, just frequenting the same functions and monopolizing each other’s time. But Tony remembered the first event they’d attended as a unit—a summer tea hosted by the women’s alumni, and presented in Edwardian splendour on the shady lawn of the college. Anne was seductive in a simple cotton dress and he felt awkward and inelegant, like a lump of earth on a china plate. With wonder, he realized she actually meant it when she told him she was enjoying herself and his company.
From there, it seemed a natural progression to marriage, and he had assumed, in the patriarchal manner of his family, that Anne would sublimate her career to his own. She had, and without protest. But time and experience educated Tony in ways formal schooling could not, and now he couldn’t contemplate Anne’s salary-less, adjunct status without guilt overcoming him. As if he didn’t have enough of that to carry already.
Removing a fur-lined glove, Tony rubbed his eyes with a heavy hand. Where the hell was he? Why? The corer, as familiar as an old friend, felt strange in his hand when he bent to retrieve it. No site in the majestic terrain seemed worth sampling and no knowledge was worth wringing from the harsh landscape. He wasn’t the first to decide solitude was not good medicine for someone at war with himself.
With a supreme mental effort Tony hauled his thoughts from the abyss of despair and surveyed the vista before him. He needed a location with deep soil so he could obtain pollen buried in the peat as long as possible. Then he could accurately re-create the changes in the vegetation of the island over time. Last year’s data indicated that about seven thousand years into the past was as far as the pollen record went. It hinted that for the last one thousand years the climate had been colder and drier than it had been for the two thousand years previous to that. Tony realized his findings agreed with studies done on Axel Heiberg Island and Devon Island, but that didn’t really raise his self-esteem. Validating someone else’s data wasn’t the activity of an innovative scientist.
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