The rocking wets the outside skin of steel and in the long afternoon the ship wriggles backwards and free, like a puppy from a cat door that’s too small for it.

We go slowly back into the rubbled path of churned-up ice chunks behind us and then accelerate forward fast and the ship rears up on top of the reluctant ice wedge and splits it and slides to a halt again. In five hours the ship’s gained several metres. It reverses and accelerates forward, again and again.

The focus of a surgeon in an operating theatre is on Captain Crane’s face. It’s like sailing through sand.

As we lie cocooned under blankets in his narrow bunk like two naughty children, Max asks me if I’m in another relationship. It’s taken him a while to ask. Antarctica’s like that, the rules are different because you’re so removed from everything that binds you in the real world. I tell Max I’m not in a relationship. I ask him if he is. He says no. I tell him I’d guessed that because if he was in a relationship, then I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.

‘Why?’

‘It’s just something I don’t do, because I’ve had it done to me. This guy, he was my lawyer, he was twenty years older than me. He’s a lion of a man, with an enormous sexual appetite. And then one day he just started taking someone else to the opera. His personal assistant. She used to book our tickets and suddenly she ended up with the seat instead of me. It was awful, and she was three years younger than me.’

Max starts laughing.

‘I’m serious! After it was all over I said to myself I’d never do that to another woman. It’s just too terrible, the hurt.’

Max listens with his chin back and his eyelids half closed. There’s a long pause. A smile comes into his eyes. He lifts the blankets and takes a long look at me naked. His finger traces my nipple.

‘If I was in another relationship, sweet Fin, would you maybe have taken off your clothes and just fallen to sleep beside me? Nothing else?’

I look at his ready cock.

‘Yeees. But, well, I mightn’t have been able to restrain myself.’