‘Nothing.’ She looked up at me quickly with such a strange, protective look that I wondered.
‘But it must have been something. And to find his voice like that — suddenly after all these years.’
‘I can’t be certain. I may have imagined it. I think I must have.’
‘But just now you said you were positive he called out to you. Besides, you went up there. He must have called out. And to find him on his feet; there must have been some compelling reason.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Your Dad was like that. He never would give up. The doctor thinks — ‘
‘Had he got his earphones on when you went in?’
‘Yes. But… Where are you going, Ian?’ I didn’t answer for I was already through the door and running up the stairs. I was thinking of the map of Labrador. She had found my father standing at the table, reaching out to the wall — and that was where the map hung. Or perhaps he had been trying to reach the bookshelf. It was below the map and it contained nothing but the books on Labrador. He was fascinated by the country. It was an obsession with him.
I turned left at the top of the stairs and there was the door with STATION G2STO stencilled on it. It was so familiar that, as I pushed it open, I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t find him seated there in front of the radio. But the wheelchair was empty, swivelled back against the wall, and the desk where he always sat was unnaturally tidy, the usual litter of notebooks, magazines and newspapers all cleared away and stacked neatly on top of the transmitter. I searched quickly through them, but there was no message, nothing.
I had been so certain I should find a message, or at least some indication of what had happened, that I stood at a loss for a moment, looking round the small den that had been his world for so long. It was all very familiar, and yet it had a strangeness because he was no longer there to give it point.
Only that had changed. All the rest remained — the school pictures, the caps, the wartime photographs, and the bits and pieces of planes with the scribbled signatures of the air crews who had been his companions. And over by the door hung the same faded picture of my grandmother, Alexandra Ferguson, her strong face unsmiling and yellowed above the tight-buttoned bodice.
I stared at it, wondering whether she would have known the answer. I had often seen him glance at the picture — or was it at the things that hung below it, the rusted pistol, the sextant, the broken paddle and the torn canvas case with the moth-eaten fur cap hanging over it? Alexandra Ferguson was his mother. She had brought him up, and somehow I’d always known those relics beneath the photograph belonged to the north of Canada, though I couldn’t remember anybody ever telling me so.
I dug back in my memory to the vague impression of a grey, bleak house somewhere in the north of Scotland, and a terrifying old woman who had come to me in the night. The photograph didn’t recall her to my mind, for all I remembered was a disembodied face hanging over me in the flickering flame of the night light, a cold, bitter, desiccated face, and then my mother had come in and they had shouted at each other until I had screamed with fear. We had left next morning and as though by common consent neither my mother nor my father had ever mentioned her to me again.
I turned back to the room, the memory of that scene still vivid. And then I was looking at the radio receiver and the morse key with the pencil lying beside it, and the memory faded. These were the things that now dominated all the bits and pieces of his life. Together they represented all that had been left to him, and somehow I felt that, as his son, I should have enough understanding of him to wring from them the thing that had driven him to such a superhuman effort.
I think it was the pencil that made me realize something was missing. There should have been a log book. He always kept a radio log. Not a proper one, of course; just a cheap exercise book in which he jotted things down — station frequencies and their times of broadcasting, scraps of weather forecasts or ships’ talk or anything from Canada, all mixed up with little drawings and anything else that came to his mind.
I found several of these exercise books in the drawer of the table, but they didn’t include the current one. The latest entry in these books was for September 15, a page of doodling in which it was almost impossible to decipher anything coherent at all. Drawings of lions seemed to predominate, and in one place he had written: C2-C2-C2 … where the hell is that? The scrawled line of a song caught my eye — LOST AND GONE FOREVER — and he had ringed it round with a series of names — Winokapau — Tishinakamau — Attikonak — Winokapau — Tishinakamau — Attikonak — repeated over and over again as a sort of decoration.
Turning back through the pages of these old log books I found they were all like that — a queer mixture of thoughts and fancies that made me realize how lonely he had been up there in that room and how desperately turned in upon himself. But here and there I picked out dates and times, and gradually a pattern emerged. Every day there was an entry for 2200 hours, undoubtedly the same station transmitting, for the entry was nearly always followed by the call sign VO6AZ, and on one page he had written V06AZ came through as usual. Later I found the name Ledder occurring — Ledder reports or Ledder again, in place of the call sign. The word expedition occurred several times.
It is difficult to convey the impression these muddled pages made. They were such an extraordinary mixture of fact and nonsense, of what he had heard over the air and the things that came into his mind, all patterned and half-obliterated with childish lines and squiggles and odd names and little drawings with the shape of a lion repeated and repeated in page after page. A psychiatrist would probably say that it was all symptomatic of cerebral damage, and yet most people doodle when they are much alone with their thoughts, and through it all ran the thread of these reports from V06AZ.
I turned to the bookcase behind me, which housed his technical library, and took down the Radio Amateur Call Book. This I knew listed all the world’s ham operators under their different countries, together with their call signs and addresses. He had explained the call sign system to me once. The prefix gave the location. G, for instance, was the prefix for all British hams. I started to look up Canada, but the book fell open almost automatically at Labrador and I saw that VO6 was the prefix for this area. Against the call sign VO6AZ appeared the names Simon amp; Ethel Ledder, c/o D.O.T. Communications, Goose Bay.
The knowledge that he had been in regular contact with Labrador drew me again to the map hanging above the transmitter, the names he had written on that last page running through my head — Winokapau — Tishinakamau — Attikonak. It was like the opening of Turner’s poem and, leaning forward across the desk, I saw that he had made some pencil markings on the map. I was certain they hadn’t been there when I’d last been in the room with him. A line had been drawn from the Indian settlement of Seven Islands on the St. Lawrence, running north into the middle of Labrador, and against it was pencilled the initials — Q.N.S. amp; L.R. To the right of it, about halfway up, an almost blank area of the map had been ringed, and here he had written Lake of the Lion with a large question mark after it.
I had just noticed Attikonak L. inked in against the outline of a large, sprawling lake, when the door behind me opened and there was a little gasp. I turned to find my mother standing there with a frightened look on her face. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
She seemed to relax at the sound of my voice. ‘You did give me a turn -1 thought for a moment — ‘ She checked herself and I realized suddenly that this was how my father had stood, leaning on the table and reaching Over towards the map of Labrador.