‘We have to be quick. In a couple of hours the ice will have changed completely.’

Below are fields of floes. From the air, the squares of ice have the neatness of cultivated country. I’m so excited at seeing my first iceberg from above I forget to take a photo. The deep fissures in the top of it make it look like a cake that has cracked as it’s been taken from its tin. Captain Crane yells I’ll have to find a new word for wow. He’s hearing it too much.

At the end of the flight my camera’s untouched. Max laughs at my crossness. He tells me that sometimes people with cameras in front of their eyes don’t see very far and he says look at Jim. He points out the obedient line of icicles frozen the length of a ladder rung beside us. He says Jim would never see them. I wouldn’t know. We pass each other in the corridor now without a word.

Max and I go often to the bow. It’s like a spy movie—we can talk up there in the open certain that we’re not going to be overheard. It takes him nine minutes to change into his outside gear and it takes me sixteen. We meet at the end of the corridor and step into the metre-wide gap between two watertight doors to the deck outside, and kiss, and step into the punch of the cold on our faces.

‘I love the bow, Finny. It’s one of my favourite places on the ship.’

Max goes there early in the morning and late at night, under auroras and satellites and stars. He goes there when parties bellow on oblivious in the belly of the ship.

He tells me he hates that scene because it’s so blokey. He tells me he’s shy in crowds. He’s thirty-eight and he says he doesn’t need it. I tell him I wish I had that courage but I don’t.

‘You’ve got to learn to say no. It’s a wonderful freedom.’

He tells me he’s reached a point in his life where he wants to say no to a lot of things, and Antarctica’s giving him the courage to do that. He says his life’s galloping towards forty and he doesn’t really want to go back to his job and his city and his house. He says God knows what’s ahead, but he’s excited about it, whatever it is.

Our bodies lean and touch.