“I thought you said you were the one who owes me.” Not antagonistic but not playful, either. Marian’s body is relaxed, but the fact that she is still wearing her coat implies she might leave at any moment.
Matilda sets Pigeon on the floor, pushes aside the tin of mussels. “It might get tiresome to continually evaluate who owes whom. I was hoping we could be something more like collaborators.” Marian gives a slight tilt of her head that Matilda decides to take as a nod. Matilda says, “I want to know why.”
“Why what?”
“Why do this flight, of course.” Matilda ticks off her fingers as she talks: “As you say yourself, it’s very dangerous. Arguably, it’s pointless, too. They’ve been to the poles. They’ve drawn all the maps. There’s nothing left to discover. It’s the most absurd idea, really. Even if you miraculously survive, you’re buying a one-way ticket to exactly where you started.” She sits back. “So. Why?”
Marian looks annoyed. “That question doesn’t interest me.”
“You mean you don’t know the answer?”
“Not exactly.”
“You don’t know exactly, or that’s not exactly what you mean?”
“Both. The second one.”
“People will want to know why.”
“What people?”
“If you do it, I thought you might write a book.”
Marian laughs. “I couldn’t write a book.”
“Anyone can write a book with a little help.”
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
Matilda fetches a stack of hardbacks from a shelf, sets them on her desk in front of Marian. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Beryl Markham. Amelia Earhart. Charles Lindbergh, though he is included grudgingly as she has not forgiven his admiration of the Nazis. “You’ve read these?”
Marian turns her head sideways, reading the titles. “Yes.”
“Then you know what to say. Write what you see, what you think, what happens. It’s not terrifically complicated. The experience is the thing. You. Not some imaginary line on the globe. If the book catches on, other avenues will open up. Lecture tours. They might even make a film about you.”
Marian looks caught between amusement and alarm. “Maybe I’d like to keep myself to myself.”
Matilda made a pfft sound. “Don’t pretend you’re so modest and na?ve. If you were, you wouldn’t want to do a stunt like this.”
Marian sits back. “I have a question for you, too.”
“By all means.”
“It’s the same as yours: Why?”
“I’ve told you—I’m trying to atone.”
“For what? What is this debt you talked about?”
Here is the moment, so conspicuous now it has arrived.
Matilda explains how Lloyd’s dislike for his own father had fueled his hatred of Germany. In a steady voice she relays what Henry had told her about the crates on the Josephina. “Your father didn’t know,” she says. “Not explicitly. I didn’t, either, but I think I should have guessed. I didn’t want to know, that much is clear.”
Marian’s face has tightened in concentration. Matilda can imagine her wearing a similar expression while flying through a storm.
“I’m not sure what to think about this,” Marian says. “I think mostly I’m relieved to know what happened.”
“Aren’t you angry? I was so angry.”
“I might have been, at other times. But it was so long ago.”
“Your life would have been very different.”
“Yes. But I can’t know how.”
After a long pause, Matilda decides to return to the business at hand. “What would be the next step? For your flight?”
“Finding the right plane.” Marian turns eager, leaning forward. “I think a surplus Dakota is the best possibility. They made thousands of them. They’re almost indestructible. They can land anywhere, and it’s not hard to put skis on them. In the war, they’d have a bigger crew, but I think I could do it with just a navigator. With auxiliary tanks, you’d have the range, too, though barely, and that’s assuming I could refuel twice in Antarctica, which is a problem but, I think, not an insurmountable one. On the Ross Sea side there’s cached fuel, but on the other…that I haven’t figured out yet. It might make sense to look for a plane in Australia or New Zealand and start the flight down there. I’ve been thinking through different scenarios. It’s a question of sneaking in between the seasons. The Arctic is less of a problem than the Antarctic.” She has become animated, gesturing at an imaginary map, but catches herself, subsides warily. “There’s still a lot to sort out.”