The Explorers' Club – Part 1: The Map Room

The map room occupied the top floor of the old club, a long oak-panelled gallery lined with framed charts, brass sextants and glass cases of compasses, with a giant globe on a mahogany stand in the centre. A fire burned low. Rain tapped at the tall windows. The committee had gone home at ten.

Eugenia sat in a leather wing chair by the fire with a map on her knee. She was fifty-eight, the club's first woman president, a veteran of four polar crossings and an Everest base camp, white-haired, straight-backed and formidable. Hector was forty-seven, her partner of ten years, a quiet cartographer who had said, in a tent in Greenland, that nothing in the world felt as safe as her voice giving orders.

"Come here," said Eugenia.

He crossed the carpet. She handed him a sheet of vellum with the club's crest. Rules of the Expedition. His limits and hers: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, nothing beyond the room, no one else. The word was Base Camp.

"Say it."

"Base Camp."

"If you say it, the President steps down. I am Eugenia. We drink brandy and look at the stars."

"I understand."

"And every half hour I ask if you wish to continue. You answer truly."

"Yes, President."

"Not yet." She rose, took a long expedition coat from the back of the chair, drew on a pair of heavy leather gloves and lifted her chin. Her voice dropped, crisp, low and absolutely level. "Mr Pryce. You were late reporting from the field."

"I am sorry, President."

"You will be." She pointed at the globe. "There. Stand. Hands behind your back. You will tell me the longitude of every place you have failed me."

He stood by the great globe, a hand's breadth from the painted oceans, his heart thumping. He began, haltingly, to name them. She listened, with her head tilted, and when he stumbled, she raised a finger and he began again.

"Are you content, Mr Pryce?"

"Content, President."

"Good. The expedition is long."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Base Camp.