Sun at Midnight
Rosie Thomas
An epic love story and adventure set against the stunning backdrop of Antarctica.Alice Peel is a geologist. She believes in observation and proof. But now she stands alone on the deck of a rickety Chilean ship as a stark landscape reveals itself. Instead of the familiar measurable world, everything that lies ahead of her is unknown and unpredictable.Six weeks earlier her life was comfortably unfolding in an Oxford summer. Then, with her relationship suddenly in pieces, she accepted an invitation to join a group working at the end of the earth: Antarctica.James Rooker is a man on the run. He's been running since his childhood in New Zealand. Now, there is nowhere further to go. He has taken a job working on the same small Antarctic research station.Alice discovers an ice-blue and silver world, lit by sunlight. Nothing has prepared her for the beauty of it, or the claustrophobia of a tiny base shared with eight men and one other woman. The isolation wipes out everyone's past, and tension crackles in the air. But there is a jolt of recognition between Alice and Rooker that is like nothing she has ever known. And it is in Antartica that she discovers something else that will change her life forever … if she survives.
Sun at Midnight
Rosie Thomas
Copyright (#ulink_b5877954-4390-570c-ac67-25811ba04ad5)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2004
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016 Jacket photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007173525
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2016 ISBN: 9780007389568
Version: 2016-09-27
Praise (#ulink_92e3d965-7b30-5056-b840-77a705a5606c)
Praise for Rosie Thomas
‘Rosie Thomas writes with beautiful, effortless prose, and shows a rare compassion and a real understanding of the nature of love.’
The Times
‘Honest and absorbing.’
Mail on Sunday
‘A master storyteller.’
Cosmopolitan
‘Thomas’s novels are beautifully written.’
Marie Claire
‘Terrific…a real weepy.’
Sunday Times
‘A story full of passion…will keep you reading long after bedtime.’
New Woman
Dedication (#ulink_9c1bac49-d479-5a58-9454-c43c87a8081c)
For the members of the XIth Bulgaria Antarctic Expedition – Christo, Dimo, Dany, Elmira, Koko, Milcho, Murphy, Niki, Roumi, Stanko and Valentin – with love and grateful thanks.
‘always on our team’
Contents
Cover (#u08b61fd6-2a64-5373-8e45-bc8aa73e3079)
Title Page (#u2b404170-a2be-5f56-aad6-3ac6f15f77ed)
Copyright (#u392e1fd4-c0a3-5fa6-8738-c3a768cb16e0)
Praise (#u12100268-58ed-50d9-bb49-b701ff6491f7)
Dedication (#u4fefd0e9-c272-5e00-8e5b-b6bf8164978f)
CHAPTER ONE (#uc344d151-4682-5685-99e2-d5384ee0289a)
CHAPTER TWO (#u7e90b04c-5da6-5552-a4c1-16107e4e6138)
CHAPTER THREE (#ue1fadf2a-677a-549e-bd3b-07a57ee2aa21)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u843e711f-c336-56b5-a7b2-8c4adc50f052)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u7ffe1cab-8e5f-5791-87a5-92f7431ded78)
CHAPTER SIX (#ue7958157-fcd1-5eee-9917-d9ef7cbb653e)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Rosie Thomas (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_fba9f171-3e8b-5f56-82ea-6841654fa539)
The wind blew straight off the frozen bay. It was thickened with sleet but the man working on the skeleton roof didn’t seem to notice the cold, or the way the flecks of ice drove into his eyes. He had climbed the raw wood truss at one end of the building and now he straddled the main beam high above the mud- and snow-smeared mess of the site. The hotel had been due to open at the beginning of the short summer season, but the weather had been bad even by local standards, and the work had been slow and dogged with problems. Now the job was way behind schedule. The first fix wasn’t even finished, a month before the completion date. The site crew were mostly Mexican, the main contractor was from Buenos Aires and they all hated the cold. The architect worked for a big commercial practice in Portland, Oregon, and he flew into town and found fault for a couple of days before flying right out again. The hotel company was German-owned, with an aggressive development programme and a policy of cutting construction costs right to the bone.
All of this was routine, however. It was work, life’s usual shit. James Rooker didn’t even bother to think about it.
He vaulted along the beam, squinting against the wind and snow, checking the bolts that secured the plates that held the trusses in place. The wood was split and some of the bolts were missing. This was Juan’s and Pepito’s work, of course.
Down below, the whistle sounded for the end of the day. Instantly a trail of men straggled across the site to deposit their tools and pick up their coats.
Rooker looked across to the bay and the snow slopes lining the Beagle Channel. It was September and the only ship in the harbour was an ugly Russian ice breaker waiting to head south, but in a few more weeks it would be summer and the cruise ships would be moored up on either side of the main jetty. The town would be full of tourists in fleeces and hiking boots, coming and going from their sea voyages and their glacier hikes and waterfall sightseeing trips and treks in the National Park. There would be a little blue-painted funfair train running through the streets, and an employee of the tourist company dressed in a giant penguin suit would spend five hours of every day posing for photographs and using his flipper to shake hands. It would soon be time to be somewhere else. As this occurred to him, Rooker noticed that the snow had stopped. A slice of sky showed through the clouds and an oblique shaft of silver light fell across the sea ice.
He swung down from his beam and clambered down a series of ladders to the ground. The finished hotel would have sympathetic wood cladding, but as yet it was a grey breeze-block slab with holes poked in it for windows. A pair of men had started work today on the ground-floor door and window frames.
He caught sight of Juan in a group making tracks towards the site gate through the skim of wet snow.
‘Hey!’ Rooker yelled. ‘You, Juan, I want you.’
The man stopped and waited. He was small, dark-skinned and hopeless. ‘Sí?’
Rooker towered over him. He jerked a thumb towards the roof timbers. ‘What’s that crap up there?’
The carpenter shrugged. He was used to the foreman’s ways. ‘Weather bad,’ he muttered routinely.
‘Then let’s get the fucking roof on straight, Mex, so we can all have some shelter. Okay?’
‘Sí.’
‘Bad work, no pesos. Comprende?’ Rooker rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.
The man nodded and hitched his canvas bag over his shoulder. It was Wednesday and the crew got paid on Thursdays, so there would be no drinking tonight. Juan just wanted to get back to his lodgings for some food and warmth and a night’s sleep.
‘Get on, then,’ Rooker said, losing patience. Everyone else was already gone, Pepito presumably amongst them. The grey light was fading fast. The roof and its correct fixing would have to wait for tomorrow, yet another day. Juan trudged away and Rooker locked up the metal cabin that served as the site hut and tool store. By the time he was padlocking the gate in the metal fencing it was fully dark. Night fell swiftly at this latitude.
He walked quickly down the hill towards the centre of town. Up here, on the outskirts, the roads that bisected the main streets were still unmade. There were mounds of filthy snow beside the steps up to narrow front doors. The houses were corrugated metal boxes not much more elaborate than the site hut, but they were brightly painted and the curtains were already snugly pulled at most of the windows. A couple of dogs reared and snarled at the end of their chains as he passed. It was bitterly cold now. As he turned right under the dirty orange glare of a street lamp he saw the lights of a plane low in the sky. It was the evening flight from Buenos Aires, coming in to land at the new airport.
The bar he was heading for wasn’t one of the brightly lit ones in the main street parallel to the harbour wall. Those places had check tablecloths and pictures on the walls, and they served fancy-priced beer or coffee or even cocktails to tourists on their way to beef barbecue restaurants. Rooker’s destination was in a side street, down three steps from sidewalk level and behind an unmarked door.
Half a dozen people looked up from their drinks when he came in and a couple of them nodded to him. He stood at the bar and the big barmaid poured him three fingers of whisky without asking what he wanted.
‘Hola,’ she muttered as she slid the tumbler across the bar. She had stopped hoping that Rooker might pay her some attention.
He drank his whisky in silence. There was nothing decorative or homely about the place, only wooden stools and bare floorboards. It was dry and fairly warm and the drink was cheap, and no one who came here was looking for more than that. It was a bar for itinerant workers, fishermen, sailors and foreign kitchen hands, a dingy place in a frontier town at the furthermost end of the world. Or almost the furthermost end.
Rooker was finishing his drink and wondering about another when the fight started. It erupted without warning, for no discernible reason, as fights often did in this place. Suddenly a table was overturned and playing cards fluttered over the floor. Two men growled and wrestled each other like drunken bears. One of them took the other by the throat and shook him, the other crooked his arm and his fist connected with his assailant’s jaw with a sharp crack. They staggered, locked together, and fell over another table. Glasses fell and smashed, and black spatters of drink marked the floor. The other drinkers stood up or shouted and the barmaid wearily reached for the telephone behind the bar.
He sidestepped away from the fracas, his face expressionless. Rooker had seen too many bar fights; this one was monotonously the same as all the others. He reached the door and walked out into the darkness without looking back. He reckoned that he might as well go home, without thinking of the place in this context as home. It was ten minutes away, back up the hill, but in the opposite direction from the new hotel. He moved unhurriedly, his hands in the pockets of his storm coat, not noticing the cold or that it had started snowing again.
The house was a two-storey building, older than most of its neighbours, with protruding eaves and a little loggia at the front. For the few precious weeks of summer there would be flowers in the blue-painted oil drums that stood under wrought-metal lanterns on either side of the front door, but for now there were only crusts of snow, clinging to dead twigs, and a scatter of cigarette butts. Officially Marta didn’t allow smoking in the house.
Rooker let himself in. In the hallway there was a smell of frying meat, an ornate carved-wood coat-stand and about a hundred framed pictures. Marta loved bric-a-brac. He had had to do battle, when he first rented his room, to get her to remove half the stuff that cluttered it up.
As he put his foot on the first stair, Marta stuck her head out of the door that led to her domain at the back of the house.
‘Qué tal, Rook?’
Marta was enormously fat, but she had a lovely face, with smooth pale skin and sad dark eyes. Her husband had left her and she was on the lookout for a replacement. Rooker greeted her without checking his progress up the stairs.
He rented the upper back half of the house. The windows faced straight out on to a steep rocky slope so there wasn’t much light, but in wintertime there wasn’t much light anywhere so this hardly mattered. He didn’t know where he would be when the summer finally did come, but it was unlikely to be here.
He hung up his coat and unlaced his boots. There was an armchair beside a small wood-burning stove, a bookcase, a table and a couple of chairs, and an alcove with a sink and a basic kitchen. In another alcove was a bed and a cupboard. The bathroom was out on the landing and Rooker shared it with the chef from one of the tourist restaurants, who rented the upstairs front.
‘It’s fine,’ he told Marta when she showed the place to him. And it was fine, once he had made her cart away all the religious pictures and lace tablecloths and wool-work cushions that filled it up. He wasn’t fussy about where he lived, so long as it didn’t take up too much of his attention.
He began to make a meal. There was the remainder of a bean and beef casserole that Marta had pressed on him, so he put the pan on an electric ring to heat it up. There was bread, and a block of strong cheese, and some smoked sausage. Rooker was just putting a plate on the table when he heard the unusual sound of someone ringing the downstairs bell. It would be a friend of Guillermo the chef’s, he thought. Guillermo did have the occasional night off work. Or maybe Marta had found a new boyfriend.
There were voices in the hallway, Marta’s and another. The caller was a woman.
Marta came puffing up the stairs and rapped on his door.
‘Rook? You got visitor,’ she called.
He looked around his room, instinctively checking for anything that might give away something of himself. But the place was almost bare, apart from clothes and food, and a few books on the shelves.
‘Rook?’ Marta repeated. Through the thin wood panels of the door he could hear her breathing, but no sound from the other woman, whoever she might be.
He opened the door. Marta’s bulk almost blocked the aperture.
‘Come up, honey,’ she called over her shoulder in her heavily accented American English. His caller wasn’t local, then.
Light, quick footsteps came up the stairs. Marta squeezed herself to one side and he saw that it was Edith.
‘Ede? Christ. What’re you doing here?’
She brought the smell of cold in with her. There was snow on her shoulders and her hair glittered with moisture. She tipped her head and her eyebrows lifted. ‘What kind of a welcome is that?’
‘What kind of arrival is this?’
Edith didn’t let her smile fade. He remembered how white her teeth always looked against her tawny skin. ‘A surprise.’
‘Damn right it is.’
She was carrying a bag. She let it drop now with a thump. Marta looked inquisitively from Rooker to Edith and back again.
Rooker sighed. ‘Okay. Come on in. Gracias, Marta.’
‘De nada.’ She was offended not to be introduced and further included in the unusual event of her back lodger having a visitor.
Edith hoisted her bag, skipped past her and nudged the door shut with her shoulder. She looked around the room, not missing a detail. ‘So this is home? It’s not all that homely, is it?’
‘It’s not home. It’s just where I live.’
After only two minutes Edith knew they had already got off on the wrong footing. Rooker felt her checking herself and trying a different approach.
‘It’s good to see you, Rook.’
She stroked her hair and settled it so it lay back over one shoulder. He took note, as she intended him to do, of how pretty she was and how small and fragile-seeming. Her feet and hands were as tiny as a child’s.
‘What are you doing in Ushuaia?’
She was still smiling at him. Her eyes danced. ‘You know what I’m doing here. And now that I am here, aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’
He was trapped. He looked at the door and at his pan of stew on the electric ring. It was smoking, so he lifted it off. ‘All right, Edith. There’s whisky. Will that do?’
‘Sure.’ She unbuttoned her coat and hung it over the back of a chair, and kicked off her snowboots. She stood in front of the stove, rubbing her hands, then took the tumbler of scotch he handed to her. He poured himself a measure and that was the end of the bottle.
‘Here’s to you and me,’ she said softly and drank. He ignored the toast.
‘How did you get here?’
‘From Buenos Aires, how else? On this evening’s flight.’ The one he had seen coming in to land.
‘Edith, I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know how you found me…’
‘Frankie told me.’
‘She had no right to do that.’ Frankie was an old friend of Rooker’s. She was younger than he was and although he had known her for fifteen years they had never slept together. He liked that, it made her different. Sometimes he e-mailed her from the locutorio off the main street. Frances was married to a chiropractor she had met at a Jerry Garcia memorial concert, and now lived in New York State with him and their three children. It still surprised Rooker to think of Frances with children, but all the evidence was that she had put her wild days behind her and settled down to being a wife and mother. He liked getting her e-mails about what the kids were up to and the latest funny thing the baby had said. Ross, her husband, was dull but decent.
‘Well, she did.’
He kept his anger in check. Frankie had always liked Edith, out of all Rooker’s girlfriends. And Frankie had his postal address, because she had sent him a book on his birthday. It was The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It stood on the shelf behind him now. He had read some of it.
‘Rook?’ Edith breathed. She put her glass on the table and came to him, holding out her hands. When he didn’t take them she grasped the front of his shirt and lifted herself on tiptoe so she could kiss him on the mouth. She tasted of whisky.
‘Don’t do that,’ he ordered. He disentangled himself from her grasp and turned away. The room was too small, there was nowhere to get away from this.
‘I love you,’ Edith said, in a new jagged voice that was raw with accusation.
‘No, you don’t. You’ve just forgotten.’
He hadn’t forgotten. The last time he saw her was in Dallas. He had arrived in Dallas as a pilot for an air charter company but that job had stopped working even before it had started, so he was filling in on yet another building site. Edith had found work as a dancer. They had been living together, an arrangement that only lasted a few weeks this time, and they had gone out drinking one night.
Edith always set out to attract attention, particularly from men in bars, and that night was no exception. She was wearing a tiny skirt that showed her toffee-coloured thighs and a stretchy top that exposed most of her breasts. Before they left the apartment she was shimmying around in front of him, laughing too much and darting hard little glances at him from under her eyelashes. Rooker knew that even if he had loved her, even if he smothered her with enough admiration and affection to suffocate them both, it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy Edith. She was born to be dissatisfied and doomed always to want more than she could get. If she had him, she wanted other men as well, for reassurance. If she didn’t have him she wouldn’t stop wheedling and threatening and seducing until he gave way to her. They had already split up twice before the night in Dallas. But Edith always knew which buttons to press.
That night she had been wild, fuelled by her anger with him and her contempt for the rest of the world. She had barely tasted her first drink before she had her tongue in some guy’s mouth. The man’s hands went straight down inside the little stretchy top and Rooker had hauled him backwards and pinned him against the bar. Even as he did it he was wondering why. He didn’t care who Edith rubbed herself up against. He didn’t want to be here with her, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else that he wanted to be.
‘Don’t do that,’ Rooker had said quietly to Edith’s new friend.
The man tried to smile. ‘Hey, I’m real sorry. I just thought…’ There were beads of sweat in the bristles above his top lip.
Rooker felt as though he was standing beside himself, watching his own actions in boredom and disgust. His hands dropped back to his sides.
‘Come on,’ he said to Edith.
Outside, she moved up against him. She was lithe and taut, like a cat. ‘Hey,’ she breathed in his ear. As always, his aggression excited her.
The evening that had begun badly grew steadily more evil. There were more bars, much more drinking. They found themselves in a place where there was lap dancing and the next thing that happened was that Edith was dancing too, out of her mind and out of her stretchy top and tiny skirt. There was a man whose thick red arms were matted with coarse gingery hair, and Rook saw one of these arms slide between Edith’s thighs. With a weight of sadness on him Rook grabbed her by the back of the neck, just as if she really were a cat, and pushed her out of reach. Then he squared up to the red man, seeing out of the corner of his eye the bar’s security staff heading towards them.
‘Fag,’ the red man sneered.
‘Outside,’ Rook answered.
The night was thick and hot. At first Rook could hardly move against the pressure of ennui and disgust, but when the man’s fist smashed almost casually into the corner of his eye the pain lit a phosphor-white blaze in his head. He hit out, and hit again. The man went down instantly and when Rook looked at him he saw that his face was split wide open. There were teeth and bone in a mess of blood, and Rook was certain that he had killed him. Sick horror and a wash of memories rose up in him and he staggered backwards, hands up in a vain effort to shut out the sight.
He left the man lying on the ground. He left Edith still inside the bar somewhere and he made his way home in painful and blurred slow motion. On the floor of the bathroom were the prints of Edith’s feet outlined in talcum powder. He rubbed them out with the side of his fist as the floor seemed to tilt sideways and the man’s smashed face stared out at him from the mirror on the wall.
When Rooker woke up again he was lying fully dressed on the bed with Edith asleep beside him. He squinted at her, because he could only open one eye. There were black pools of mascara darkening her eye sockets and her breath bubbled through her slack lips. The light in the room was dirty grey and the air was hot to breathe. He sat up very slowly, wincing with pain. There was dried blood on the pillow where his head had rested. Sour-tasting saliva flooded his mouth.
I have to get away from here, from this, he thought.
Before he could move again, Edith stirred. She blinked at him and briefly focused. ‘Dear Jesus,’ she muttered.
Rooker stood up and slowly turned his head to the mirror on her dresser. His left eye was puffed up, the skin crimson and shiny. His eyelashes were crusted black spikes embedded in the bruised tissue. A ragged cut with oozing margins ran from the centre point of his cheekbone to the corner of his eye. The man must have been wearing a heavy ring. He put his fingers up to touch the place, memories of the night before coming back to him in small unwelcome fragments. Edith lay motionless.
‘What happened?’ he mumbled. He meant what had happened to the man he had killed.
‘You ran off and left me in some shitty bar with a bunch of creeps, that’s what happened.’
‘The guy, Edith. Is he dead?’
She coughed and then groaned. ‘Dead? No. But he needed some help getting home. So did I, but you’d gone.’
Rooker gathered his thoughts.
Of course the man wasn’t dead. Of course not. Immediately he felt reprieved. He had a chance after all, provided he grabbed it immediately. Leave now. The words pulsed in his head, taking on neon-bright colours that hurt the insides of his eyes. Just leave, get out of here and away from this.
He went to the closet and took out his old canvas holdall. He began stuffing clothes and books into it.
Edith raised herself on one elbow. ‘What are you doing?’
‘You can see what I’m doing.’
‘Where are we going?’
It came into his mind how much he hated we. All the bars and street corners, all the beds and apartments in different cities that were contained in that small word, all the arguments and reconciliations and half-hearted bargains struck and reneged upon, not just with Edith but with other women, and to what end?
‘We aren’t going anywhere. I am.’ He flung the last handful of his belongings into his bag and zipped it up.
‘Fuck you, Rook.’
‘Whatever you say.’ His wallet was missing, he realised. Somewhere between the bar and his bed last night he had lost it, or more likely someone had stolen it. It didn’t matter. Edith sat up. Tears started in her eyes and spilled out, running down through the black patches of yesterday’s make-up. Even when she was looking ugly Edith was beautiful.
“Bye,’ he said, hoisting his bag.
‘Wait,’ she shouted, but he was already at the door. ‘I hate you,’ Edith screamed at his back. ‘I hate you.’
Rooker had gone first to Miami, where a friend of his from back in Christchurch had a small airfreight business. He was doing well. Rook stayed with him as his eye turned from red to black and then faded through purple as the cut healed, although raggedly, because he hadn’t bothered to have it stitched. He had the idea that Ken might also give him some work, but instead he pointed out quite accurately that Rook hadn’t logged any flying hours in three years and he would need some refresher training before any outfit could take him on.
‘Back to pilot school?’ Rook frowned. ‘I’m forty-six years old.’
‘Listen, mate. We both know you can fly. But this business is one hundred per cent above board and without current certification you don’t step inside one of my planes. Get it?’
‘Thanks.’ Rook shrugged.
‘Don’t mention it. And you might consider throttling back on the booze as well.’
From Miami Rooker went to Rio, mostly because he had never been there before. After Rio he went to Buenos Aires, but restlessness gnawed at him and he found himself moving further and further south, as if he was being driven away from the populous centre of the world and out to the margins, where he belonged. He didn’t try to swim against the current. He passed through Rio Gallegos and then, because there was still somewhere further to go, yet more remote, he drifted on down to Ushuaia. The southernmost town in South America clings on to the world between the tailbone of the Andes and the mountainous seas of the Drake Passage.
Now Edith had found him.
‘Would I have come all this way if I didn’t care about you?’ she murmured. She touched the tight red scar that linked his eye to his cheekbone. ‘Rook?’
‘I don’t want this.’
Her fingers were unpicking the tongue of his belt from the heavy buckle.
‘Not even for old times’ sake?’ Her lips and eyelids looked a little swollen and he remembered they always used to thicken this way when they made love. It was an unwelcome recollection, but it still excited him.
Edith’s fingers travelled downwards. ‘But you do, don’t you?’ she whispered. ‘See?’
Well, then, since you’re here, we might as well, Rook thought. If this is what you’ve come all this way for.
He propelled her backwards and hoisted her on to his bed. Immediately she twisted her legs round his waist to hold him. Her head tipped back and her black hair fanned out on his pillow. Before he closed his eyes he saw that there was a triumphant glint in her smile.
Afterwards she nestled up against him, as light as a bird.
‘We’ll find a better place than this, Rook. I’ll start looking tomorrow. Maybe one of those neat little tin-roof houses, painted bright blue or red, like I saw on the way up in the taxi? Then, once I’ve got it fixed up, I’ll look for some work. Perhaps in one of the hotels, or in the tourist office? I’ll have a blue suit, maybe, and a name badge. That would be funny, wouldn’t it? I’ll say to the tourists, “Welcome to Ushuaia. You have a nice day.” Then I’ll come on home and cook us some dinner. We’ll have a bottle of wine, watch some TV, then go to bed. Don’t you think?’
Rook thought this scenario was about as realistic as Edith deciding that she was going to be elected president and planning what to do about the White House drapes.
The room was quiet and the silence outside was unbroken. Rook sat and listened to nothing. It was only on paydays that there was much noise around these streets at night.
Edith fell asleep, curled up around her small fists. He moved softly, putting on his coat and picking up his boots from beside the stove. At the doorway he hesitated, looked back at her and wondered if he was going to feel a flicker of affection or tenderness. Nothing came. He might have been looking at a stranger asleep on a bench at a train station, or at a picture of a woman in a magazine.
He was usually impervious to the cold, but as he let himself out of the front door and walked out into the street Rooker was shivering.
In a bar, a different place from the one he had visited earlier but the same in almost every respect, he met a man he knew.
Dave was a big, shaggy blond New Zealander who did odd jobs to fund his sailing and mountaineering habits. ‘They’re hiring down south, you know,’ he told Rooker.
The only place south of Ushuaia was the Antarctic continent.
Rook took another mouthful of his drink. ‘Yeah? McMurdo?’
McMurdo was the American polar research station down on the Ross Ice Shelf. Rooker had worked there for a brief summer season when he was in his early twenties. It had been a dull interlude. He had spent most of his time driving a shuttle bus between the gritty main street of the base and the airfield a couple of miles away. His few other memories mostly involved off-duty hours spent in a windowless bar. But it was watching the helo and fixed-wing pilots swooping away, lifting off the airfield and into the limitless white, that made him realise that he wanted to be a flyer himself.
Dave shook his head. ‘Nope. It’s a new station, some rich guy’s bought a redundant base off the Brits and he’s tooling it up to be run for, whatchacallit, in Europe? The EU?’
Rooker laughed. ‘Needs something to spend his money on, does he?’
‘I guess. Sullavan, that’s his name. I came across the site on the net when I was surfin’ this morning. Sounded kinda interesting, in a crazy way.’
It did, Rooker thought. Keep going, that was the idea. Keep going, while some place even further away still beckons.
He remembered how remote McMurdo had seemed, ringed by the ice and overlooked by the cone of Mount Erebus. In comparison, Ushuaia felt like a shimmering metropolis at the very epicentre of the world.
Dave was saying that if he hadn’t fancied heading away to Byron Bay for a summer’s surfing and sailing, he might have given it a try.
‘Is that right?’
Rooker bought him another beer and a whisky for himself. He had a long night to while away.
In the end he stayed up until the last bar closed. Dave had said goodnight and gone home hours earlier, but Rooker banged on his door until he got up and let him in to doze in an armchair. When the morning finally came he didn’t show up for work. At 10 a.m., unshaven but sourly sober, he was waiting for the locutorio to open. Ahead of him in the line was a tourist couple holding a map open against the wind, the first arrivals of the summer’s migration.
Paula, the locutorio manager, came up the concrete steps and unlocked the door. She flashed him a smile and gave him the best terminal in exchange for three pesos. Rooker logged on and began the search for Lewis Sullavan’s polar website.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_0682f638-429c-51d3-8bb7-b4f4ea2bd9fd)
It was a warm, still day. There were pools of deep shadow under the great trees and the river reflected the light like a sheet of crumpled tinfoil. Drawn by the day’s brilliance, Alice Peel had left her desk on an impulse and walked out into the University Parks. She moved slowly, letting the sun beat on the top of her head and the back of her neck. Once she stretched her arms out in front of her, absently noting the pallor of her skin. It was a weekday and it felt odd but distinctly pleasant to be wandering around in the middle of the afternoon. There were only a few other strolling or lounging figures dotted against the wide swath of grass. There was almost another month to go before the students returned and the academic year slipped into gear once more.
The scent of mown grass mingled with dust from the path. It had been a dry summer and the margins of the leaves were nibbled with brown. When she glanced up into the blue sky she saw a contrail sketched by the pinpoint of an aircraft. She wondered briefly where the plane was headed, with its cargo of passengers and their expectations. The speculation faded gently in her mind, like the vapour itself dissolving against the sky.
When the path reached the river she turned left to follow the curve of the bank. Ahead of her a footbridge and its reflection merged to make an O, the lower half blurred like a winking eye. She listened to the slow beat of her own footfalls and then to the tinny scratching of distant music. The scratching grew steadily louder and a punt rounded a bend in the river. Framed in the bridge’s O, it turned watery furrows of pewter and olive-green as it surged closer. A girl was vigorously poling. When she lifted the pole between thrusts, droplets ran down her arm and beaded the smooth wood, then struck silvery chips out of the water’s surface. The punt’s four or five passengers lolled on the cushions, laughing up at her. Their voices cut across the music.
The girl’s T-shirt rode up to reveal a tattoo on her belly. The punt was close enough for Alice to see that the design was a butterfly before she realised that the man sitting on the flat prow with his back to her was Peter. The thick hair was his, and the skull’s distinctive architecture beneath it, and the faded shirt was the one she had washed yesterday and hung out to dry on the line in the back garden. He was leaning back, supporting his weight on his splayed hands. The unexpected sight of him made her heart jump.
The punt drew level. The voices and the laughter were loud, raised over the blare of music. The girl with the pole didn’t glance at her. The long craft slid by, stirring the smell of mud and weeds mingled with boat varnish.
Peter’s head idly tilted, then he caught sight of Alice, already receding on the riverbank. He sat upright. ‘Al! Hello, Al!’
He scrambled to his feet, windmilling his arms at her. The punt rocked wildly and he danced barefoot on the slippery wood. She caught a brief glimpse of surprise like a flaw in the ready glitter of his smile.
‘Aaaaa-al,’ he shouted again. He was already into a jump, knees drawn up to his chest, the smile still seeming to hang in the air as his limbs hit the water. A plume of glittering spray shot into the air to the accompaniment of shrieks from the punt’s passengers. The girl didn’t shout. She stood looking back over her shoulder, her weight resting on one hip so that her body made a graceful curve against the willow trees on the opposite bank. The pole trailed in her hand.
Peter’s head broke the water and he struck out towards Alice. A minute later he hauled himself on to the bank. Grinning and dripping, he shook himself like a huge dog. Dark droplets of water spattered the dust.
‘Hi,’ he gasped to Alice. “Bye!’ he called after the punt as it slid away.
Disregarding his sopping clothes, Peter swept her into his arms. A watery kiss landed on her cheek.
‘Pete,’ she said. She wasn’t surprised. The shouting, the impetuous leap into the water, they were all typical of him. But she felt disquiet wrinkling her usual smooth tolerance of his extravagant behaviour. The declining sun shone straight into her eyes, causing her to frown. ‘Who were they?’
He waved the arm that wasn’t attached to her, spinning out more drops to pockmark the dust. ‘Students.’
‘I thought you were teaching today.’
Peter was an artist. He built big cuboid sculptures of tubes and wire and twisted metal that also incorporated found objects like pram frames and tailors’ dummies. He didn’t sell a lot of his work and he taught an art summer school for extra money.
‘We were playing hookey. And I thought you were working. Hey. Since we’re both not working, let’s go and have tea somewhere.’
‘But you’re wet.’
‘You’re dry enough for both of us.’ He kissed her again, on the tip of her nose. ‘Lovely and dry and warm. Are you hungry? Come on. Scones and cream. You know you want to.’
She smiled at him. There was a café near the gates of the Parks. They walked there together, Peter comically wincing whenever his bare feet encountered a sharp stone.
On the way they met a sculptor who rented the studio next to Peter’s. Pete introduced him to Alice and they lingered to talk.
‘I was in a punt, Alice was on the bank, so what could I do but jump in and swim to her?’ Peter laughed as he explained.
‘Er, pole in to the bank and just step ashore?’ Mark was literal-minded.
‘You have no soul,’ Peter rebuked him.
They ended up heading for the café together.
Alice walked beside Mark and Peter shuffled backwards ahead of the two of them so he could see and talk at the same time. As they passed a builder’s skip outside the park gates he noticed a typist’s chair with the padded seat and back support missing. He hoisted it by the metal claw foot and carried it away with him, spinning the shaft as he talked.
There was a table free in the little row on the pavement outside the café and they crowded round it. Peter took off his shirt and draped it over his salvaged chair skeleton. His arms and shoulders were well developed from lugging heavy materials and oxyacetylene welding gear. Steam rose gently from his damp trousers.
When it arrived, Alice poured the tea. The others were talking about art.
She half listened to a heated conversation she seemed to have been overhearing ever since she had known Peter. In her experience art always appeared to involve arguments. It was messily subjective. To Pete, one piece of work might be magnificent, enormously impressive, and another might be timid, derivative shit or mere fusty doodling (to employ his vocabulary), but Alice could never work out which was going to be which, or if there was any empirical evidence on which to base these opinions. She found it difficult to predict what Pete was going to admire and what he would dismiss, and whenever she thought she had mastered one critical vocabulary so they might at least discuss the matter, the entire language was prone to change.
In the end it came down to a matter of taste, she believed, and there was no measuring or calibrating taste.
Science was different. As a scientist herself and the child of scientists, Alice had reason and logic in her blood. Knowledge meant measurement, demonstration, proof. Theories could be postulated, but it was necessary to back them up with solid data. Evidence was searched for and analysed, and knowledge slowly but steadily built up, tiny accretions of it accumulating in layers to make solid bulwarks of unassailable fact. There was debate and there were opposing theories, of course, and there was international and personal competition, but the main thrust was mutually constructive and collaborative. Unlike art.
‘What’s funny?’ Mark asked her. Alice hadn’t realised that she was smiling.
‘Nothing, really. I’m just listening.’
‘But what do you think?’
Sunlight lay across the table. The tea in her cup reflected a glittering bronze disc. Pete sprawled back in his chair, lanky and at ease, grinning at her. Their life together was made up of a series of small encounters like this one. They met friends, had tea or dinner or went to the pub together. They went to parties and gave their own – were giving one the very next evening, in fact. Peter was gregarious and liked nothing better than to gather a crowd of people around him. It meant that she didn’t see a lot of him on his own, but she didn’t mind that. She had what she wanted in life.
She smiled more broadly now. ‘I think I’d like another scone before Pete devours the lot.’
She didn’t want to be drawn into the endless discussions about art. Peter never listened to anyone else anyway. He stopped with half a scone almost into his mouth and returned it to his plate. Scooping some extra jam on top, he transferred it to Alice’s plate.
‘Thank you.’
‘What do you do? Are you an artist?’ Mark persisted.
‘A scientist. A sedimentary geologist.’
‘My God,’ he said.
‘He’s one theory. Not many geologists subscribe to it, though.’
They all laughed. Alice bit into the jam-laden scone, enjoying her appetite and the lazy bickering of the two men, and the prospect of going home with Peter to their house and the quiet late-summer twilight in their tiny garden.
When the scones had been eaten and the teapot refilled and emptied twice, they stood up. As they said goodbye, Peter invited Mark to tomorrow’s party. Finally Peter shouldered his chair-remnant, and he and Alice headed for home. The route was so familiar to both of them that they could have walked it blindfolded. They crossed St Giles and walked down Beaumont Street. The end-of-the-day traffic was heavy, but when they turned into Jericho everything was quiet again. The little red-brick houses with their Gothic touches had been built in the nineteenth century for clerks and the more senior college servants, but lately they had become sought after and very expensive.
Alice couldn’t have afforded to buy one, not on an academic’s salary, and of course Peter wasn’t able to contribute anything, but her mother had helped her with the down payment.
This sequence of recollections didn’t quite play itself out in full as she opened the low gate, but it coloured the fabric of her thoughts. Sometimes it seemed to Alice that her mother’s life was always the vivid, engrossing, three-dimensional backdrop against which her own activities were executed on a much dimmer and smaller scale.
Peter hoisted the wrecked chair straight over the wall, snapping one of the rose branches that she was training over a rope swag. It landed foot uppermost, the wheeled claw sluggishly rotating.
‘Will it be safe there?’ she asked as he followed her up the short tiled path to the front door.
He took her question entirely at face value. ‘Should be. I’ll take it over to the studio first thing.’
It was cool inside the house. From where she stood in the hallway, as Pete’s mouth brushed against the nape of her neck, Alice could see straight through the kitchen doors into the garden. There was a blue-painted bench and a little rustic table, and a crab-apple tree for shade.
Pete’s hands slid up and cupped her breasts. ‘Mmm?’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go to bed.’
Their bedroom would be cool too, behind white blinds.
With clasped hands they trod up the stairs.
A minute later they were stretched out on the white-covered bed. Alice tipped her head back, her eyes closed, and Pete’s hand secured her wrists above her head so she couldn’t break free. On the bedside table the phone cheeped. Pete swore, but neither of them made a move towards it. After a dozen rings, the answering machine picked up.
‘Alice, are you there?’
There was a pause and then an audible tut-tutting of annoyance. ‘Well, wherever can you be, at this time of day? I need to speak to you. Give me a ring straight back, won’t you?’ The voice was brisk, busy as always.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Pete murmured. He gathered Alice up and rolled adroitly so that she ended up on top. He never voiced any criticism of Alice’s mother, the formidable Margaret Mather, but there was not much love lost. Alice didn’t pursue this line of thought either. Now was not the time to be thinking about Margaret. Now was not the time to be thinking of anything but this.
Afterwards they lay with their legs interlocked, listening to the small sounds of the street through the open window. Pete hummed a little, an unborn sequence of notes reverberating deep in his chest. Alice smiled, her cheek against his shoulder sticky with their mingled sweat.
She would call in and see her parents in the morning.
Margaret Mather sat at the gate-legged table in the large bay window of the house on Boar’s Hill. Books and papers and correspondence leaned in haphazard piles on either side of her computer monitor and keyboard. She had never been tidy, or even faintly house-proud, and the table was littered with half-full teacups and dirty plates as well as her sheaves of work. The rest of the room was cluttered and dusty, and the Persian rugs were matted with cat hair. The cat itself, a fat white creature with a penetrating smell, lay on the sofa and licked its rear parts.
Margaret’s husband Trevor worked or read in his small upstairs study with a view of the sloping garden. His room was bare by comparison and together with Alice’s old bedroom it represented the only ordered area in the entire house. Although Alice had long ago left home, her room remained exactly as it had always been. Her teenage books filled the shelves and there were framed school and netball team photographs on the walls. It wasn’t that Margaret had preserved it as any kind of shrine to her daughter’s childhood, rather that she had never got around to doing anything else with it. In the same way, a hopbine gathered on a country holiday twelve years earlier was still rakishly pinned to the beam in the kitchen, and was now a dust-and-grease fossil of its former self.
Margaret was listening to music and working through the morning’s e-mails. She peered at the screen through her bifocals, reading interesting titbits aloud to herself and muttering the responses as she prodded them out of her keyboard. She was in her seventies, but she took to new technology with enthusiasm. E-mail made her complicated correspondences with friends and with fellow scientists all over the world much easier. She loved to explain to anyone who would listen that, for example, she could now chat on a daily basis with her old friend Harvey Golding who was based in San Diego and whom she hadn’t seen in the flesh for more than twelve years.
‘And I can keep abreast. See what the others are up to. It’s all there on the net, you know. Much easier nowadays.’
By ‘the others’ she meant scientists working in her field, marine mammal biology.
In the 1960s Margaret had made a series of television films about whales and seals in the seas surrounding Antarctica. She spent many months of the year living down on the ice, even doing most of her own underwater camerawork. She wrote the films’ drily lyrical commentaries too, and narrated them in her strong Yorkshire accent. The series made her and her voice famous.
She was never short of energy. Even after she had become a celebrity she continued her research and maintained her reputation as a serious scientist. Her meticulous work on the breeding patterns of Weddell seals pioneered a subsequent generation of Antarctic studies.
This morning, Margaret was replying to a personal message from Lewis Sullavan.
There had been a succession of increasingly insistent communications from his staff and now there was one from the great man himself. She sat for a moment with her fingers resting beside the keyboard. She looked out into the garden without seeing the heavy trees that leaned over into the lane, then shook herself and began.
‘My dear friend, I really cannot accept your kind invitation,’ she recited as she picked out the words. ‘Much as I would like to. The fact is that I am now 77 years of age and I have severe arthritis. However, there remains the alternative proposal.’
The cat yawned and stood up to claw the sofa cushions. Margaret heard Trevor’s footsteps crossing the upstairs landing from the bathroom to his study. The floorboards creaked as they always did.
‘My daughter is very interested in the idea,’ Margaret typed and whistled through her teeth as she sat back to review what she had written.
‘We’ll see, eh?’ she said, addressing the last remark to the cat.
She heard a car and quickly looked up. Alice’s car rounded the overgrown circular flowerbed that blocked the space between the house and the gate to the road, and drew up outside the front door.
‘Soon enough,’ Margaret added. She saved her unfinished message to Lewis Sullavan and was hobbling away from a blank screen by the time Alice came in.
‘Ah, there you are at last,’ Margaret said briskly.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_b0add565-934b-5b34-b7e5-a53106901ee0)
Alice had brought a bunch of bright orange lilies with chocolate-speckled throats, her mother’s favourite flowers. She wrapped her arms round Margaret, hugging her close. She saw that the room looked as it always did; it was her mother who seemed smaller, as if the disorder might finally be on the point of overwhelming her.
‘Hello, Mum. Here I am.’
After a brief embrace Margaret leaned away, apparently for a better view of her daughter.
Alice’s hair was thick and slightly wavy, the same texture and silvery blonde colour as Margaret’s had also once been. Margaret’s was white now, and she wore it bluntly chopped round her face They were both slightly built, but Alice seemed to grow taller as Margaret’s painful stoop increased. Margaret said that her daughter was much more contemplative and serious-minded than she had ever been, but Trevor insisted that she was so like her mother at the same age that they could have passed for twins. Neither woman believed him.
‘Mum, the music’s very loud. Can I turn it down a bit?’
‘Is it? All right.’
Margaret motioned to the CD player and watched with a touch of envy as Alice swung with an unthinking fluid movement and muted the sound.
‘How do you feel?’ Alice asked.
‘I’m grand,’ she answered, although the pain was bad today. ‘And we’re away on holiday in three days, even though we don’t do so much here that needs taking a holiday from.’
‘Come on, you’re just going to stay in a nice hotel in Madeira and enjoy being waited on for once. Why don’t you sit down?’
Margaret gave an impatient shrug but she let Alice guide her gently to the sofa. They sat down once Alice had pushed the cat aside.
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’ll be down as soon as he realises you’re here. I want a word first.’
‘Is something wrong? Have you seen Dr Davey?’
‘Don’t fuss, Alice. I’m perfectly fine.’ Margaret’s feet in elastic-sided shoes were placed flat on the floor, exactly together, toes pointing forward. She sat upright, hands folded.
Her mother wanted to be invulnerable, to remain as allcapable and all-knowing as she had always managed to be. Alice understood that perfectly. She knew that she despised her own increasing physical frailty, as if it were some moral weakness. In fact, there was nothing weak about Margaret and there never had been. She had been one of the first women scientists to penetrate the male domain of Antarctic research; she had filmed her seals beneath the ice of the polar sea and she had never shrunk from anything just because she was a woman, or a wife, or a mother. Her great energy and singlemindedness tended rather to make everyone around her feel weak by comparison. Recognition of this was one of the strongest of the many bonds between Alice and her father.
‘No, this is about you,’ Margaret announced.
Alice tried not to sigh. ‘Go on. I’m listening,’ she said.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ Margaret glanced over the top of her bifocals towards the kitchen, as if this were some hitherto-unexplored wilderness region. It wasn’t that it daunted her, more that it didn’t offer interesting opportunities. Her lack of culinary ability was legendary.
‘Later. I’ll make it.’
‘All right. Now. Where were we? Yes. Listen to me. I’ve got a tip-top invitation for you.’
Margaret clapped her hands, then paused for dramatic effect while Alice wondered what awards dinner or institution’s prize-giving her mother had been asked to preside over, and at which she would be offered as a disappointing last-minute substitute. Being Margaret Mather’s daughter didn’t mean that she could make an audience eat out of her hand the way her mother did.
‘You have been invited to go to Kandahar Station,’ she announced grandly.
Alice had never heard of it, so couldn’t express either enthusiasm or reluctance. ‘What?’
‘Lewis Sullavan has personally asked you.’
‘Lewis Sullavan doesn’t know me from a hole in the fence.’
But Alice knew who he was. His media empire had been founded in the 1960s with a stake in one of the early commercial television companies. It had grown, hydra-headed, since then and now included newspapers and magazines in the UK and Europe, a Hollywood film company and interests in television companies across the world.
‘And if he doesn’t know me, why would he invite me out of the blue to go to some station I’ve never heard of?’
Margaret didn’t even blink. Age had rimmed her eyes with red and faded her dark eyelashes to the colour of dry sand, but her gaze was as sharp as it had ever been.
Alice quietly answered the question for herself. ‘Because of you.’ For as long as she could remember she had been notable because of her mother’s achievements rather than her own.
It made her feel mean and small to be resentful of this, and as an adult she was learning to accept what she couldn’t change, but she used to wish that she could be just Alice Peel, making her own way via her own mistakes and minor triumphs. Instead, she was always living in the half-light of reflected glory. The house she lived in had been purchased with her mother’s financial assistance and she even had a suspicion, lying just the other side of rationality, that her lectureship at the University was hers as much because of who she was as what she could do.
Even her choice of subject had been influenced by her mother. Alice might have wished to become a biologist herself, but there was no question that she could, or would, ever compete with what Margaret had done. Instead, she had chosen geology, her father’s speciality. In her teens they had taken camping trips alone together, looking at rocks. These times, when she had had the undivided attention of one of her parents, were amongst the happiest of Alice’s life.
Now, sitting beside her mother on the cat-scented sofa, she took Margaret’s dry hands between hers, noting the tiny flicker of resistance that came before submission. Margaret had never been physically demonstrative. In her view excessive hugging and kissing were for film actors, not real people.
‘Go on. Tell me. How do you know this media mogul and what is Kandahar Station?’
‘I met him many years ago when I was making my first series for the television.’ It was always the television, in Margaret’s old-fashioned way.
‘I didn’t know that.’
Margaret’s brief nod seemed to acknowledge that there were many episodes in her life that the passage of years and the accumulation of success had left half submerged. ‘It’s a very long time ago.’
She sounded tired, Alice realised with a stab of anxiety. It was a good thing that Trevor had been able to persuade her to take a ten-day break in Madeira.
Margaret withdrew her hands and smoothed her trousers over her knees. The jersey fabric was baggy and whiskered with cat hair. When she was younger, Alice remembered, her mother had had an ambivalent attitude to clothes. She had loved style and making a statement, but had been hampered by the suspicion that this didn’t go with serious science. So she had adopted a look that was all her own, in which plain suits and conservative dresses were enlivened with wicked shoes, or ethnic necklaces, or a wide-brimmed hat looped with scarves. These days, however, she dressed mostly for comfort.
‘Kandahar Station is Lewis’s current toy,’ she continued and her briskness came back again. ‘It’s a new research base. Largely funded at present by Sullavan himself, but with some EU support. As you know, he’s passionately pro-Europe. The intention is that Kandahar will ultimately offer facilities for European scientists and joint European research initiatives across all the relevant disciplines.’
This sounded like a speech. And if Margaret had rehearsed it, then what she was going to say must be important.
‘And where is it?’ Alice asked, although she knew the answer to this question too.
‘Antarctica.’
Of course.
Alice had grown up with the waterfall sound of the word. The pictures of it were as familiar as the view from this window. Some of them still adorned the walls and mantel here in Margaret’s room. In the most famous one of all, the younger Margaret crouched beside a hole in the ice shelf, dressed in the corpulent rubber folds of a diver’s drysuit. She had pulled off her rubber hood and the wind blew her hair away from her head like a silvery halo. A seal’s head poked up out of the ice hole and it looked as if they were amiably chatting together.
In another a stiffly posed group of bearded men stood in the snow outside a low-built wooden hut. Margaret’s figure at the end of the line looked tiny, like an afterthought, but her head was held erect and her chin jutted firmly forward.
Margaret was in her forties before her only child was born and most of her polar adventures were already behind her, but to the small Alice, hearing the stories, her mother’s doings and those of Scott and Shackleton and the others had run together into a continuous and present mythology of snow and terrible cold and heroic bravery. She curled up under her warm blankets and shivered, full of admiration and awe, as well as pride that her own mother somehow belonged to this bearded company. At the same time she made a childish resolution that she would never venture to such a place herself and her decision seemed to be endorsed by the fact that her father had never been there either.
More than twenty-five years later, Alice saw no reason to change her mind. ‘No,’ she said now, smiling as she did so but without letting a tremor of uncertainty colour her voice.
‘Alice, it’s an honour. Sir Lewis wants to name the laboratory block Margaret Mather House. What do you think of that?’
‘It is an honour,’ Alice gently agreed. ‘Do you think it would be too much for you to go yourself? To see the ice again?’
Margaret’s face flooded with longing but she shook her head. ‘I would go if…if I didn’t have damned arthritis and if I wasn’t going to be a nuisance and a liability.’
Anyone planning to travel south would have to undergo medical and fitness examinations. Margaret knew she wouldn’t pass any tests. And it would be Margaret’s idea of misery, of course, to feel that she might be a burden.
‘So. I want you to go instead. In my place. Lewis has asked for you.’
The imperiousness of her demand grated on Alice. ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ she answered as calmly as she could. Antarctica was her mother’s love, not hers. The idea of the southern continent lay in her mind like a vast, cold dead end at the bottom of the world. She didn’t want its icy walls to close around her.
Margaret lifted one hand. ‘Hear me out. It’s not just a PR excursion, Alice. You are being offered a place on the base for the entire summer season. Just think. For a geologist to be given the chance to go to Antarctica? You can pursue your own research project. Write your own ticket. You will have funding, you can use Sullavan’s infrastructure. It’s a great chance, a career opportunity you shouldn’t turn your back on. You’ve even got the time this year to do it.’
That much was true. After five years of teaching undergraduates, Alice had a six-month break coming up in which to pursue her own research. She planned to do some field work in western Turkey, making a broad analysis of sedimentary rock structures in a system of active faults. Travel to Turkey was easy enough to allow her to come back to Oxford, and Peter, as often as possible.
The familiar waves of Margaret’s enthusiasm and determination pounded against Alice. She felt as if she were some eroding shoreline that had been withstanding this onslaught for a lifetime. She scrabbled against the undertow, trying to keep her balance and hold firm against the current. ‘I’m flattered. And I can see that it would be a nice media hook for Sullavan.’
That was what it was about, of course. Some television footage, newspaper and magazine articles about the scientist daughter following in the scientist mother’s footsteps, pictures of the base, a good excuse to bring out all the archive photographs from Margaret’s heyday. It would be another publicity angle by which to promote a very rich man’s latest way of diverting himself. Alice didn’t admire what she had heard about Lewis Sullavan.
‘But I have made my plans for the next six months, you know.’
There was the sound of creaking floorboards again.
‘And now here’s your father,’ Margaret announced superfluously.
Trevor Peel was a small, pink-faced, egg-shaped man. He eased himself round the door, aiming to create the minimum of disturbance by his entrance. A fringe of feathery white hair clung to his otherwise perfectly bald head. From behind the shield of his gold-rimmed glasses he was trying to secondguess the temperature between his wife and daughter. ‘Mm, aha. I’ve been putting some things in a suitcase. Better now than at the last minute. So what do you think?’ he said to Alice. He knew about Margaret’s invitation and also Alice’s likely response to the idea of travelling in her place.
Alice loved her father dearly. His mildness was deceptive. He had a sharp mind, but it was coupled with a tolerant disposition. He had lacked the ambition rather than the intellect to reach the front rank himself as a scientist and he had always been aware of this deficiency. He had devoted himself to encouraging his formidable wife instead and in this they had been an ideal match. All through Alice’s childhood, Margaret had often been away but Trevor was invariably there. They had formed a sympathetic company of two, moving quietly in Margaret’s wake. Trevor had been retired for ten years now. He occupied himself with reading, crosswords, gardening and Margaret’s needs.
Alice’s eyes met his. There was no need to speak. Over the years they had developed a silent language of their own. Today’s communication was keep your head down.
‘I don’t understand her,’ Margaret announced. ‘I would have thought she would jump at an offer like this.’
‘Ah,’ Trevor said.
Everyone understood that Margaret had known that Alice wouldn’t do anything of the kind, but had assumed that she would be able to override her opposition.
‘You’ve got a few days to think it over, Alice. I’ll let Lewis know you’re considering it very seriously. No one could expect you to make a decision on the spot. Although I would have done. We can discuss it properly when we come back from this holiday.’ She spoke the word as if it were Gulag or torture chamber.
The glance that passed between Trevor and Alice said better try and nip this in the bud.
Alice drew in a breath. ‘Mummy, I don’t want to go to Antarctica. I’m sorry to spoil a nice story and turn my back on history at the same time, but I’m not going. It doesn’t fit in with my plans.’
This didn’t come out right. She intended to be cheerfully firm but she ended up sounding feeble as well as petulant, as she too often did when she was forced into open conflict with her mother.
‘Just give me your reasons why not,’ Margaret said. So she could then set out to demolish them.
Alice reflected that there were many reasons, but they could all be placed under the same heading. ‘Because I am happy where I am,’ she said gently.
She thought about sitting in the sun yesterday afternoon, eating scones and listening to Peter and Mark. She remembered the cool bedroom light and the heat of Peter’s mouth on her skin. Tonight their house would be full of friends and music. She knew where she would be and what she would be doing, next week and the week after that. Order and certainty were important to her. She didn’t like question without answer, thesis without proof. She liked her work, even loved it, but she didn’t want to make it her entire reason for living. Antarctica was an unknown and Alice preferred the known world.
Margaret’s eyebrows drew together. She put her head on one side, in the way she did when she was considering a problem. ‘I don’t see what happiness has to do with anything,’ she said at length.
No, Alice thought.
Her mother understood achievement, as in doing your best and then improving on that. She had no fear and no self-doubt. She didn’t care much about her own comforts and not at all when she had a goal in mind. Happiness would come a long way down her list of considerations. This was what Alice believed, although she realised with a small jolt that the two of them had never talked about it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.
Trevor patted his tweed pockets, searching for his cigarettes. He only smoked outside the house, by Margaret’s decree, and this was his unconscious signalling that he wanted to get out of the room.
‘I’ll make some coffee.’
‘Is it too early for a sherry?’
Trevor and Alice spoke brightly, simultaneously. With difficulty Margaret stood up and walked slowly back to her table. She sat upright at her keyboard, hitching her loose cardigan round her.
I have disappointed her, Alice thought. It was not a new realisation. She went quickly and stood behind the chair, cupping her mother’s shoulders in her warm hands.
‘I will have a cup of coffee, thank you,’ Margaret said.
Later, Alice walked in the garden with Trevor.
They descended a set of mossy steps and reached the fence that separated their land from the neighbour’s plot. There was a sycamore tree in the angle of the fence, casting too much shade so nothing would grow beneath it. The bare earth was dry and scented with cat. They leaned against the tree’s rough bark to smoke, looking up the garden at the cream-washed stucco of the house. It was too big for two elderly people and it had acquired a neglected aspect. Paint was peeling off the window frames and there was a long streak of damp in the render beneath a broken gutter.
Trevor drew a line in the dust with the toe of his shoe. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked tentatively.
Alice had been remembering how big this garden used to seem when she had conquered the shrubbery and built dens in the hedges. As big as a whole country, and the swampy pond with its frog population had been a wide sea.
‘Sure?’ she repeated.
‘About not going south.’
‘Yes, I am. Realistically, what would my study be?’
It was much easier to talk to Trevor like this, not just because he was interested in the scope of her sedimentological rock investigations but because he listened to what she said, whether it was related to science or not.
‘You won’t need to apply for funding, as I understand it. You just go, look at something that interests you and Sullavan picks up the tab. That doesn’t happen every day, does it?’
Almost all research projects involved time spent in the field, studying rock formations and collecting samples for lab analysis. Expeditions to remote places were expensive to set up and needed complex support. Proposals had to be carefully directed and worded to attract approval and sufficient financial support from the funding bodies, and this was often the hardest part of the process. Alice was still waiting to hear whether she would be awarded a grant for her next six months’ research.
‘What is the deal?’
She hadn’t given Margaret the opportunity to explain even this much herself, so her mother wasn’t the only one guilty of not listening. Sometimes, she thought, we bring out the worst in each other. We work against one another’s grain, setting up ridges and splinters.
Trevor threw his cigarette end into the hedge. ‘It’s a maverick set-up, as you would expect with anything connected to Sullavan. Kandahar is down at the base of the Antarctic peninsula. It was built in the 1950s for the British Antarctic Survey, who closed it down in the late 1990s as surplus to requirements. The bay gets iced up in winter and it’s difficult to supply as a year-round station. They were on the point of dismantling the buildings and clearing the site when Sullavan stepped in and offered to buy it as the base for his pet project: United Europe in Antarctica. It was much cheaper for BAS to sell the place standing than pay for clearance, so Sullavan got quite a bargain. Now he’s got to get some decent science underway; it probably doesn’t matter too much exactly what so long as it has popular appeal and preferably a few familiar names connected with it. Which is where Margaret comes in.’
And by extension her daughter, neither of them went on to add.
‘I see.’
‘Not tempted?’
A lawnmower was whining monotonously somewhere in the middle distance. The gardener was probably Roger Armstrong, a mathematician whose garden on the other side of the lane was tended with millimetric precision, in striking contrast to the Peels’. Trevor liked to wander between his hedges and stand rocking on the balls of his feet while he peered into his tangled flowerbeds. He believed that a garden should be a place to stroll or sit and think, a sanctuary, not a job of work. Today, as if to prove him right, it looked beautiful in its dishevelment. Clumps of goldenrod glowed in the sun and even the mildew on the asters took on a silvery glamour. Thanks to Roger Armstrong’s efforts the air was full of the lush scent of late-season grass.
‘Not in the least.’ Alice smiled. It was easy to sound entirely certain.
Her father put an arm round her and hugged her. His smell, as always, was a compound of cigarettes and wool and something of himself, perfectly clean but also animal like a horse or a dog. She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.
‘Well, then. I’m glad you’re so contented,’ Trevor said easily.
As she lifted her head Alice heard a sigh and then a click, as if there had been a second’s interruption of time. She looked along the path towards the goldenrod, seeing it as if she had never looked at it before, all broken up into waves of different depths of colour, and hearing the lawnmower’s buzz separated into a series of vibrating notes that sprayed through the air like drops of molten metal.
Is this what happiness means? she wondered. Just this?
The thought sounded a single hollow note within her head.
Then the world remembered its path and moved forward again. There were just ragged yellow flowers that were not much more than weeds and the sound of a neighbour working in his garden on a sunny Saturday morning.
‘What about Mum?’ Alice asked. ‘Will you get her to have a rest on this holiday?’
Trevor hunched his shoulders, spread his hands slightly. They had been exchanging this gesture for many years, the two of them. They left the shade of the sycamore tree and walked back up the slope of grass to the kitchen door. Dandelion clocks released small seed parachutes as their feet brushed past. Margaret had turned the music up again. The orange lilies had been put in a green enamel jug and placed beside her computer.
The two old people tried to persuade Alice to stay for lunch. Margaret even said she thought there was some cold ham somewhere, by way of an extra inducement.
‘No, I’ve really got to go because we’re having all these people round this evening, and I’ve still got to make the food and buy wine,’ Alice said.
‘Can’t Peter do something?’
It wasn’t that Trevor and Margaret disliked Peter, more that they didn’t understand how he lived a life with no particular plans, not even a proper routine. They thought that his habits and the hours he kept were incompatible with a productive existence. The few pieces of his work that they had seen left even Margaret with nothing to say. They believed that art lived on gallery or drawingroom walls and didn’t incorporate the contents of builders’ skips.
For his part Peter was always polite to them, but the politeness had a resistance to it that was almost ruder than if he had dispensed with it and just been himself.
‘It’s easier if I do it. He’ll be in charge of the barbecuing. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to drive you to the airport on Tuesday?’
‘Your father’s arranged a car to pick us up.’
‘Is there anything else I can do? Shopping? Packing?’
‘I’ve travelled to a few places in my life, Alice. I can manage a ten-day package trip to Madeira.’
‘I know you have, I know you can. So. Have a lovely time. Just sit in the sun. I’ll call you before you go.’
Alice hugged her mother as she left. In her arms, Margaret felt as light and dry as a leaf. Alice had been aware of the change for the past year or two, but it was still uncomfortable to recognise that the woman who had been such an embodiment of strength for her whole life was growing weaker.
‘Think about Kandahar,’ Margaret called after her, as a parting challenge. She believed in having the last word.
Trevor came out to the car to say goodbye. ‘I’d go, you know, if I were in your shoes,’ he said, startling her so that she paused, halfway into the driver’s seat.
‘But you never did go.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t. Maybe I should have done, but that sort of thing was Margaret’s role. She was the adventurer, so I was the stay-at-home. I loved her far too much to risk offering any competition, and then you were born and I didn’t want to miss a single day of your life. But if I were you, now, today, that would be quite different.’
Not for the first time, Alice reflected on her father’s unselfishness. He possessed enough for two. For three, if she counted herself into the equation. She had no children, no husband, yet, no evident ties – except for Pete, although he was enough to keep her firmly anchored. At least I’ve come far enough to recognise that I am selfish, she thought. Trevor was beaming at her. The breeze fluffed up the white feathers of his hair.
‘Then you wouldn’t have been you. You wouldn’t be you now. I don’t want you to be any different from the way you are,’ Alice told him.
He nodded. ‘I don’t think you need have any anxiety on that score. No new tricks for an old dog, you know.’
‘Good.’ She kissed his cheek. As always, Trevor convinced her that the world was a secure place.
‘Have a lovely holiday. Look after Mum.’
‘You know I’ll do that.’
He stood back to watch her go, his hands in the pockets of his shapeless trousers and his hair like thistledown in the sunlight.
It was 5.30 and Alice was lying in a hot bath when Peter appeared in the bathroom doorway. She saw his reflection first in the steamy mirror, then turned her head to smile at him. He was carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.
‘I think I’ll join you.’ He grinned.
Pete unbuttoned his shirt, unbuckled his belt and pulled off his jeans. He had olive skin and a flat stomach. Alice watched him, noticing the play of muscles in his arms and back. He looked clean, even his hands and fingernails were clean, unlike the way they usually were when he came back from a day in the studio.
‘Were you working?’
He was naked now, but not in the least vulnerable. He stepped into the water, so that Alice had to sit up to make room for him. Heavily scented water slopped over the edge of the bath as he sank backwards.
‘Yeah.’
She didn’t say anything and after a beat of silence he added, ‘I had a mass of paperwork. Invoices, bills, all kinds of shit. I hate doing all that.’
‘I know you do. Pete?’
She was going to say, I had a moment this afternoon when I thought is this all? She had intended to ask him if he was happy, if what they had between them was good. If it was enough. But this, she knew, was what Pete would dismiss as a quintessential woman’s question.
‘Yeah?’ He locked his legs round her. Bubbles of foam popped close to their ears. Pete gave her a misted glass of champagne, clinked his own against it and drank. He licked a silver rim of froth off his top lip.
‘I’ve been asked to spend a season in Antarctica.’
‘And?’
And what? she wondered. What if I said, ‘I’m going, and I won’t be back for six months?’ Instead she murmured, ‘Well, I said no, of course.’
Pete nodded. That was what he would expect. He was used to her, to her precise ways, to the regularity of their life together that provided a framework for his erratic behaviour. When they were first together he used to steal pages of her work and frown over the stratigraphical analyses of rock structures. He would turn the equations that represented deformations upside down, playing up his bafflement. Alice used to try to explain to him that these equations were like pictures, abstract illustrations of dynamic relationships that to her were far more vivid than words or photographs. They were the same to her as his sculptures were to him: a shorthand expression of a solid state and at the same time an airy thumbnail sketch of sublime reality. They rendered down the universe, or they tried to.
Alice suddenly smiled. She was thinking in artists’ language.
Pete sat up, sending another wave slopping over the side of the bath. He took her face in his hands and drew her closer so their mouths touched. Her champagne glass tipped sideways and she spilled some in the water.
‘You know, Al. You’re incredibly beautiful when you smile like that.’
She closed her eyes as he kissed her. But not before she had seen a twist at the corner of his mouth and a flash in his black eyes that she couldn’t read.
Pete was the one who ended the kiss. He drank the rest of his champagne at a gulp and stood up, brandishing his glass. Water and bubbles slicked the black hairs on his legs into sleek lines.
‘We’re going to have a great party,’ he said. He didn’t ask any more about Antarctica. Alice had said that of course she wasn’t going, so there was no need to pursue it.
It was a good party.
Pete flipped sausages and chicken pieces on and off the barbecue in the back garden. There were candles in little coloured glass vases hanging in the branches of the tree and the night air was so still that the flames burned without a tremor. People brought their paper plates of food and glasses of wine outside to sit in the moth-filled darkness, and music drifted out of the windows over their heads. In between last-minute preparations Alice had found ten minutes to pull on a black frock that showed her cleavage and new stiletto-heeled sandals that made her feel tall but also slightly at risk of toppling forward over her own toes.
‘Nice dress,’ Mark the sculptor said, with his eyes on her front. Alice laughed and put her arm through his to steer him into the middle of the next group. The house and garden overflowed with different people, painters and writers and lecturers and scientists as well as the old friends Alice had grown up with. Oxford had been her home for most of her life and she loved this bringing together and shaking up of different elements from within it. She moved through the crowd, laughing and talking, catching Pete’s eye once in a while, checking that he thought it was going well too. They were good at this, making a celebration together. Recognising that the party was now moving under its own impetus, she gave herself up to the pleasure of it.
Alice’s oldest friend Jo was there and her husband Harry. They had brought their three-month-old twins and put them in their car-seat cradles to sleep in Alice and Pete’s bedroom.
‘Al, I am so knackered,’ Jo muttered. She had black rings under her eyes and her flat hair clung to her cheeks. ‘They never sleep at the same time. I never get more than an hour. What am I going to do?’
‘They’ll start sleeping better soon.’ Alice took her friend’s hands and rubbed them between her own.
‘When?’ Jo wailed. ‘I want my life back. I want to be myself again.’
‘You will be yourself. It’s only time.’
Becky arrived late. Her current man was a psychologist, an unnervingly handsome Indian who didn’t say very much. As always, Becky talked enough for both of them.
‘I’m sorry, Al, have we missed everything? The traffic from London, you wouldn’t believe, Vijay said we should just move to Oxford. Shall I come back, wouldn’t that be a gas? Jo! Come here, baby-mother, give me a hug. Mmm, look at you. God, your boobs are so fabulous.’
Alice and Becky and Jo had been friends since the fourth form. Jo had once said, ‘I’m the good girl, Alice is the clever girl and Becky is the star in the firmament.’
Now Jo said, ‘I’ve just got to go up and check on them again. I don’t know where Harry is.’ She looked as if she was going to cry.
Becky and Alice glanced at each other.
‘Harry’s in the garden with Pete. I’ll go up and make sure they’re still fast asleep, you sit here and talk to Beck,’ Alice told her.
She gave them both a glass of wine and went quietly up the stairs. The dancing had started and loud music came up through the floorboards but it didn’t seem to bother Jo’s babies. They slept in their padded plastic cradles. One of them held his fist against his cheek, the thumb not quite connecting with his mouth. Alice stooped down to look closer and found that she wanted to touch the tip of her finger to his rosy skin. She stopped herself in case he woke up, but she crouched there for a long minute, watching and listening. Downstairs, someone turned the music up even further. The party was changing up a gear.
She stood up again, almost reluctantly, and walked to the door. It was ajar and from the semi-darkness of the bedroom she could see down to the half-landing where a pretty arched window looked over the garden. Pete was standing in the angle of the stairs, just out of sight of anyone who might be in the hallway. His hand slid slowly down the back of a girl who was pressed up against him, came to rest on her bottom. She was wearing a cropped pink top that exposed a broad expanse of skin above lowslung trousers.
Alice stood completely still. He bent his head and kissed her, then whispered something in her ear. She angled herself closer still, the movement eloquent of intimacy and familiarity. The two of them knew one another’s bodies.
A second later the girl ducked away from him. She used her thumbs to flick her long hair back behind her ears and smiled at him from beneath her eyelashes before she skipped down the stairs. Pete leaned against the wall for a second, staring down into the garden. If he had looked the other way, up the stairs, he would have met Alice’s eyes. But he didn’t. He rose up on to the balls of his feet, as if balancing on the brink of something delightful, then followed the girl.
It was just a kiss at a party.
She told herself that it meant nothing, it was what parties were for. She would go downstairs herself and kiss Mark, or preferably Vijay.
But everything about the tiny encounter told her that it wasn’t nothing; it was much more than just a kiss at a party.
Becky and Jo both stared at her as she came back.
‘Hey,’ Becky said softly.
‘Are they all right?’ Jo was already heaving herself to her feet.
‘They’re fine. I just saw Pete kissing some girl on the stairs.’
Now it was Becky and Jo who looked at each other.
‘Which girl?’
Alice glanced around the crowded room. Faces nodded and mouthed through the smoke and music. A tide of dirty plates and ashtrays lapped against the walls.
‘That one.’ She was standing by the mantelpiece. Midway between the prominent crest of her hip bone and her neat bellybutton there was a butterfly tattoo.
‘Never seen her before,’ Becky said.
‘She’s one of Pete’s students.’
‘And where is he?’ Jo asked in a let-me-at-him way.
Alice forced a smile. ‘He’d better keep out of my sight for an hour.’
She drank some more wine and tried to reconnect to her earlier enjoyment. She kept talking and laughing, then she danced with Mark and with Harry. She saw Pete moving through the skeins of people, even caught his eye as she had done at the start of the evening, but it was only a brief connection. She wanted to dance with him, but they were never in the right place together.
At 1 a.m. Jo and Harry went home, carrying a baby seat apiece down the stairs. Becky and Vijay left at two.
‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Becky said, concern showing in her eyes.
‘Don’t worry, I’m fine.’
The hard-core guests stayed until it was light. She would have liked to be drunk herself, but all she felt was cold. Pete had spent the last hour playing his guitar and singing with the remaining handful of people. Now he was sitting on the sofa, picking out chords and humming with his head down. There was a glass of whisky at his feet.
Alice stood in front of him and he raised his head to look at her. His eyes weren’t quite focusing. The room seemed to press in around the two of them, full of the weight of their combined belongings and the evening’s events.
Pete strummed a chord and sang, ‘Just the two of us, just you and…me.’
‘Pete, come to bed.’
The bedroom was disorientatingly light. Alice took off the black dress and hung it up in her cupboard, Pete stripped off his clothes and left them in a heap. They lay down and Pete gave a long sigh, then turned and lay against her, one arm heavy over her hips.
‘Who was she?’ Alice asked.
‘Who was who?’
‘The girl with the tattoo.’
‘Tattoo? I dunno. All girls have tattoos. ’Cept you.’ He laughed into her hair and she shivered with the first wave of longing for intimacy that was already gone.
‘She was with you yesterday. In the punt.’
‘Punt? Oh, yeah, her. Georgia.’
Alice lay on her back, watching the ceiling. If he says anything else, she thought, it will be all right. If I have to ask him what he was doing with her it won’t be. The seconds passed. Out of the furthest corner of her eye she was aware of the digital clock on the bedside table. The green numerals changed, 23, 24. Then she realised from Pete’s slow breathing that he had fallen asleep.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_14aea596-2ffb-5de3-b679-1dd94c0a862d)
‘Your mother’s not very well,’ Trevor said.
Alice was sitting at her desk in the Department of Geology. She had been trying to concentrate on her work but her eyes kept sliding to the square of sky visible from her window. Now as she pressed the phone to her ear the maps she had been studying lost their definition and ran together in a grey blur. ‘What? What’s wrong?’
‘She’s picked up a chest infection. The hotel doctor’s a bit worried about her.’
‘Can I talk to her?’
‘She’s asleep at the moment.’
‘How long has she been ill?’
‘A couple of days.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Trevor sighed. ‘You know what she’s like.’
Small, fierce, unfaltering, impatient with weakness. As stubborn as a rock formation. Yes, Alice knew what her mother was like.
‘Are you going to bring her home? Shall I come out there?’
‘There’s no need for that. Rest and antibiotics is what she needs.’
‘Are you sure? I’ll call you later and see how she is. Give her a kiss from me when she wakes up.’
After Trevor had rung off Alice tried to turn back to her work, but anxiety nudged at her and in the end she gave up. It was almost lunchtime. Jo’s house was nearby and Jo would have constructive advice to offer. But it was Pete she wanted to talk to. She would call in at his studio and tell him about Margaret. They could have a sandwich and a cup of coffee together. Alice left her desk at once and rode her bicycle through the traffic.
The studio was in an old warehouse at the end of a cul-de-sac. Mark’s side was closed up, but the heavy door to Pete’s hung narrowly ajar, sagging slightly on its hinges. Alice padlocked her bike to a street sign advising that there was no parking. A smart new Mini was parked right alongside.
She edged round the door and slipped into the studio. It was dim inside after the bright daylight. Pete wasn’t working, then. The blinds at the big windows were all drawn. The concrete-floored space smelled of dust and resin, and something familiar scraped at her subconscious in the split second before she identified it and the association. It was music, the same song that had been playing in the punt on the afternoon when Pete jumped into the water.
His latest work in progress loomed above Alice’s head. It was a bird’s nest of twisted metal and within the lattice cage some of his found objects were suspended on thin wires – a buckled bicycle wheel, a polystyrene wig block like a blanched head that revolved very slowly as the studio air stirred. The hair at the nape of Alice’s neck prickled as she looked around for the source of the music. Peter’s welding torch lay on the ground, with the black welding mask that made him look like Darth Vader discarded beside it. She took three quick steps to the inner door, past more accumulated debris.
The door led into a boxed-off cubicle with a metalworker’s bench at which Pete did his smaller-scale work. There was a grey filing cabinet, a kettle and a clutch of mugs stained with rings of tannin. The CD player was balanced on the broken typist’s chair from the skip outside the Parks. A girl’s handbag, an expensive-looking fringed suede affair, spilled its contents on the floor. The girl herself was perched on the edge of the cluttered bench, steadying herself with her hands. Her denim legs stretched out on either side of Pete’s head.
Pete hadn’t heard Alice come in. Just above and to the side of his right ear Alice could see the butterfly tattoo.
The girl looked straight into Alice’s eyes as the song finished.
‘Oh, shit,’ the girl said.
Alice didn’t move. There was a scramble of movements from the other two as Peter leaped to his feet and the girl pulled up and zipped her jeans. She bent down sideways and picked up her bag, briefly holding it in front of her chest as if it were a piece of body armour.
Peter shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. For the moment he was silenced.
It was the girl who spoke first. ‘Look, what can I say?’
She had one of those low, drawling voices. Alice knew that it must be her car parked outside, probably a twentyfirst present from Daddy. Pete liked girls who weren’t going to rely on him for support. She belonged in that category herself. The thought struck a shiver of bewildered amusement through her and when he glimpsed it in her face Pete winced and said in a thick voice, ‘Al, you know, it isn’t…’
‘It isn’t what I think? Is that what you’re going to say?’
He held up his hand. ‘Georgia, you’d better go.’
With a part of her mind Alice was noticing how pretty she was and how young she looked. In contrast to this glowing girl she felt old and dull. She was also surprised by Georgia’s self-possession. She had hitched her bag over her shoulder and now she was looking coolly around the little room to see if she had dropped anything else. She leaned across and pressed a button to eject the disc from the player. When she had tucked it inside her bag she stood facing Pete with her back to Alice. Alice gazed at the graceful lines of her neck and narrow shoulders.
‘When will I see you again?’
He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not for a bit.’
‘I see. Well, then, I’ll call you.’ She turned away and glanced at Alice. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. It wasn’t intended to be like this. But all’s fair, as the saying goes.’
Then she left.
What does one say now? Alice wondered. Pete was waiting, ready to take his cue from her. He looked like a schoolboy anticipating a scolding, half truculent and half defiant. She wanted to tell him that he was an adult, a grown man. He couldn’t get away with being a naughty boy for ever.
‘I came over because my mother’s not well. I’m worried about her. I was thinking we could have lunch. Just a sandwich or something.’
Her words fell into the space between them. Pete’s expression changed to one of relief, reprieve.
‘Of course we can. Come on. Where would you like to go?’
‘What? No. I don’t want to go anywhere. That was before I saw…what I just saw.’
He rushed in: ‘Al, believe me, it’s one of those dumb things, it doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It’s just a dick thing?’
His face flushed. ‘No. Well, if you want to call it that, yes. I suppose.’
‘How many?’
‘How many times? For God’s sake. She’s just a student.’
‘I meant how many other women.’
‘Alice, please. What do you think I am? I’m with you, I love you.’
She stared at him. She wanted to have him put his arms round her and hear him saying that this was all a mistake – not in the guilty, formulaic way that he was saying it now, but in a way that meant she could believe him. And at the same time she knew that this was utterly unrealistic because she would never be able to believe what he told her, never again, no matter what he said. He had lied to her and he was lying to her now.
When he had finished protesting she listened carefully. She thought she could hear a tiny, feathery whisper. It was the sound of her illusions, softly collapsing.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
He thumped his clenched fist on the bench. It was a theatrical gesture. ‘Listen, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. It was a mistake and I was regretting it even before you walked in. But it happens.’ The way an avalanche happens, or a thunderstorm, presumably. A natural cataclysm that was beyond his control.
Alice said carefully, ‘You didn’t look as though you were regretting it. I’m going back to work now. We’ll have to talk about what’s going to happen, about how to…’ She was going to say put an end to everything, but she couldn’t find a word that fitted. ‘But I don’t want to do it today. If you can’t find a place to stay tonight, I’ll go to Jo’s.’
She was dry-eyed and her voice sounded level, but she didn’t feel in control. Her stomach churned with nausea and the palms of her hands were wet. Then she turned round and walked out through the studio. The polystyrene head was still gently turning on its thread of wire. She had never understood Peter’s art, she thought. She had longed to, had dragged her mind and her senses to contemplation of it over and over again, but she had never been able to make sense of it. She was like Trevor and Margaret, really: just a literal-minded scientist.
Unable to think clearly, she cycled back to her office, combed her hair and drank a glass of water. Then she sat through a long discussion with five of her colleagues about grant allocations for the coming year. She took the minutes, concentrating on noting everyone’s different points with meticulous accuracy. Once or twice, though, when someone spoke to her, she found herself staring at them and struggling to inject meaning into the babble of their words.
‘Are you all right, Alice?’ Professor Devine asked as the meeting broke up. David Devine was the head of her department and an old friend of both of her parents.
She smiled straight at him. ‘Yes, thanks, I’m fine.’ In fact, she felt sick.
From her office, she called Jo. ‘Are you in? Can I drop in after work?’
‘Of course I’m in. I’m always in. The babies are having a bit of a crap day, though.’
‘I’ll give you a hand.’
Jo and Harry lived in Headington. Alice cycled slowly up the hill, buffeted by the tailwind from passing buses, her legs feeling like bags of wet sand. She rang Jo’s doorbell and leaned against the wall of the porch while she waited for her to come to the door. How many times had she stood here?
Jo opened the door with one of the babies held against her shoulder. She cupped the back of his head with one hand and kept him in place with her chin and forearm. There was a bottle of formula in her free hand. Alice kissed her, smelling baby sick and talcum powder.
‘Come through,’ Jo said. She edged past the double babycarrier that blocked the hall and led the way to the kitchen. The second twin was in a Moses basket on the table. He was awake, his black-eyed stare fixed on the shadows moving on the ceiling above him. ‘Cup of tea? Wine?’
‘I’d love some tea, please,’ Alice said. She didn’t think she could keep a glass of wine down although she would have welcomed the bluntening effect of alcohol. ‘Can I hold him?’
Jo handed the baby over at once. He frowned and squinted up at Alice, who knew that she handled him with that stiff, alarmed concentration of the utterly unpractised. He responded by going stiff himself and puckering his face up, ready to start crying.
‘Here, plug this in,’ Jo said, handing over the bottle of formula. Alice poked the rubber teat into the baby’s mouth and he began to suck. She eased herself into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, the Moses basket and a packet of Pampers and a pile of baby clothes at her elbow. Through the open doors into the garden she could see leaves and the ragged, dirty-pink globes of mophead hydrangeas. Getting into his stride, the baby snuffled and sucked more vigorously.
‘How are you?’ Alice asked and Jo half turned from the sink. She looked, as she so often did nowadays, on the verge of tears.
‘I’ve had to start bottle-feeding in the last couple of days. I just can’t go on feeding them both myself. This way, they sleep a bit longer between feeds and I can sometimes get as much as two hours myself.’
‘That’s much better, isn’t it?’
Jo nodded, but without seeming convinced. She wanted to be a good mother, as well as a good girl, and that meant breastfeeding. Alice knew this without Jo having to say as much.
‘Look at me, Ali,’ Jo said quietly.
‘I am looking.’
She was wearing a shapeless shirt under which her breasts swam like porpoises. Her skirt hem hung unevenly and revealed pale calves and unshaven shins, and her pretty face was drawn. Alice thought she looked older but there was also a new solemnity about her, an extra elemental dimension that added greatly to her appeal. Even in her weariness she was sexier than she had ever been before her pregnancy.
‘Sometimes I think that no one ever looks at me now, even Harry. I’m an invisible appendage. I have no function except as a machine for feeding and wiping and tending Leo and Charlie. I’m just a mother. I want to be myself, but I can’t even remember what I was like before this happened.’
‘You are yourself. Only more so. This time will pass.’
Alice wanted to put an arm round her friend, but she was pinned down by the baby she was nursing. And this was only one of them, for a few minutes. When she looked out into the garden again she saw how narrow the view really was. Jo had told her how long it took to get both babies ready to leave the house, even for a walk to the shops. What must it be like, to think that the world had shrunk from its infinite breadth to the four walls of a house and a square of suburban garden?
‘It’s only twelve weeks since they were born. They’ll grow up and start running around.’ With the present helpless morsel of humanity in her arms, Alice realised how very far in the future this must seem.
Jo sighed. ‘I know, of course they will. It is getting better, too. Remember at the beginning when some days I didn’t even find time to get dressed? I’m sorry, Al. I don’t mean to complain. I’m just sounding off because I’ve been here on my own all day. I wanted them so much and I do love them. I didn’t even know what loving meant before I had them.’
She put a teapot and two mugs on the table.
‘Which one is this?’ Alice asked sheepishly.
Jo laughed. ‘Leo.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll learn to tell them apart.’
‘Don’t worry. Even Harry gets it wrong half the time. D’you want some toast or a biscuit or something? ’Fraid I haven’t made a Victoria sponge.’
Alice shook her head quickly.
Jo eyed her, then sat down next to her at the table. ‘What’s up?’
‘It’s Pete.’
‘Go on.’
Alice told her. While she was talking Leo’s eyelids fluttered and then closed. His gums loosened on the bottle teat and a shiny whitish bubble swelled at the corner of his mouth.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jo said at the end. ‘And I’m sorry for going on and on about my problems without giving you a chance.’
‘You didn’t. You never do that.’
There was a moment of quiet in the kitchen. Both babies were asleep, and the oasis of calm silence was more notable and the more precious because it would last only a few minutes. Jo’s face went smooth and luminous as she stared peacefully into the garden. Alice’s sympathy for her twitched into sudden envy and she bit her lip at the realisation.
She said, ‘The thing is, I’m not sure that Georgia is the only one. Now I’ve seen this much, all kinds of other details seem to be falling into place. Pete’s so evasive and maybe I’ve been convincing myself that it’s just because he’s an artist, needs space, can’t be tied down. When he doesn’t come home in the evenings, when he goes off to Falmouth or London or Dieppe for days at a time, I just get on with my work and feel pleased about how…how separately productive and mutually in accord we are. In fact, he’s probably got half a dozen women on the go, hasn’t he?’
She started on a laugh to distance herself from this possibility and then a flicker in Jo’s eyes made the laughter stick in her throat.
‘What do you know? Jo, please tell me.’
Jo hesitated. ‘Harry saw him one night. In a pub near Bicester.’
‘Everyone goes to the pub, Jo. Quite a lot of Pete’s working life seems to take place in them, in fact. What does he call it? Necessary inspiration?’
But when Jo said nothing Alice felt the last of her defences crumbling. Was I happy? she wondered. Or was I just determined to be? ‘Go on,’ she said miserably.
‘Pete didn’t see him, because he had his tongue down some woman’s throat at the time. That’s how Harry put it. He said they didn’t look as if they were going to get as far as the car park before they…well. I’m sorry, Al. I’m so tactless. I’ve forgotten how to talk to real people, haven’t I?’
‘Was it Georgia?’
‘It didn’t sound like her.’
‘No. I see.’
In the Moses basket Charlie stirred and gave an experimental whimper. Jo said, ‘It’s coming up to his lively time. He’ll be awake now until about ten. I thought you sort of knew about Pete and that was the way you chose to handle it. Knowing and not knowing.’
‘Perhaps,’ Alice murmured. Humiliation made her want to bend double, as if she had a stomach-ache.
‘You deserve better,’ Jo observed, lifting Charlie out of his basket as full-scale crying got under way. She rocked him gently, shushing him softly.
‘Perhaps,’ Alice said again.
‘Do you love him?’
Yes, she loved him. Or was it actually the idea of him that she loved, the concept of Pete? Not just the illusory domesticity that they had enjoyed, but the very way his disarray and lack of precision had made an anarchic foil for her own selfimposed orderliness?
Perhaps that was it. His work, his pieces of sculpture, were only just on the right side of giant rubbish heaps. (Of course they are, he would say. It is all a metaphor for our world. Arbitrary arrangements scraped together in a disintegrating society, drowning in its own discarded refuse. Or something like that. She never had quite mastered the language.) Whereas she had grown up with Trevor, sitting on a sun-warmed stone and watching her father frowning and scribbling stratigraphic measurements in his notebook. She had loved the names of the rocks. Gabbro and dolerite and basalt. The earth’s apparent solidity and her father’s dependability had somehow fused into a reassuring constant. It was only much later, as a geology student herself, that she began to appreciate the immense scale of the earth’s restlessness. And now, in her mid-thirties, as the balance of power between them shifted and her parents grew frailer, and as Pete’s shape shifted, her notions of what was solid and dependable were all being overturned.
‘I don’t know,’ she told Jo now. The realisation that she truly didn’t know shocked her.
‘What will you do? Tell him to behave or else?’
‘It’s a bit late for that. I was going to ask if I could stay here until he’s moved out?’
They were both holding a baby. The sun had moved off the garden and the light was fading.
Jo said immediately, ‘Of course you can.’
Alice made pasta for dinner while Jo bathed the babies and fed them again. Harry came home, his face creased from the day, and they juggled the wakeful twins between the three of them while they ate. Pete rang Alice’s mobile every half-hour, but she didn’t take the calls. He rang Jo and Harry’s number too, and Harry did pick up the phone.
‘Yeah, she’s here. But I’d leave it for a while, mate, if I were you.’
The calls stopped after that. Before she went to bed Alice spoke to her father in the hotel in Madeira. ‘Is she feeling any better?’
‘The doctor called in again. He’s been very good. We think she might be better off at home, you know, so we’re going to take a flight tomorrow. All being well, that is.’
‘Can you put her on?’
Alice put the flat of her hand against the wall of Jo’s spare bedroom, wanting to feel its solidity.
‘It’s very annoying,’ Margaret said into the phone. The words were hers but her voice was almost unrecognisable, falling between a whisper and a sigh.
‘You’ll be fine. Once you’re home. A couple of days and you’ll be yourself again.’
‘Will I?’ She asked the question as though she were a child.
‘Yes,’ Alice said with a tremor in her voice.
In their bedroom, Jo and Harry undressed for bed. One baby was asleep, the other cried every time Jo put him down. They would alternate this routine throughout the night. If he had to work the next day Harry usually slept in the spare room, but tonight Alice was in it. Jo walked up and down, rhythmically rocking the baby against her, willing him to fall asleep.
‘She’s very precise. Not detached, or unsentimental, not exactly. But she doesn’t waver, or change her mind. If she’s decided it’s all over with Pete then it’s over.’
Harry took off his socks, balled them up and aimed them towards the laundry basket. ‘Yes? Probably for the best, then.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know, though. She seemed happy with Pete. He countered that precision in her. Made her more spontaneous.’
Harry lay down and closed his eyes. ‘Are you going to get into bed?’
Jo smiled, sat down on the edge of the bed and swivelled so that her back rested against the headboard, trying at the same time not to interrupt the rocking. She wanted to talk to Harry now, piecing together the day’s events and impressions. Just for ten minutes, before she entered the hushed tunnel of another night when every living thing seemed to sleep except for herself and one or both of the babies.
‘Al’s my best friend. But sometimes I think I don’t know her at all. I mean, I’ve never even glimpsed it, but beneath all that cool logic there might be a wild heart beating. Don’t you think?’
There was no answer. When she looked at him she saw that Harry had plunged into sleep.
Alice went home for a change of clothes. Pete had been there, she could tell from the crumbs on the counter and a single plate and knife in the sink, but there was no other sign. There was no note and she thought that most of his belongings were still in their accustomed places. She registered this much, then dismissed the thought. The latest telephone conversation with Trevor had left a hard knot of anxiety in her chest. Margaret had had a bad night and was suffering breathing difficulties. There was some doubt about whether she would be able to fly home at all, although she was still insisting that this was what she wanted. Alice said to her father that she would meet them at the airport but Trevor told her that he had arranged a private ambulance. Margaret would be driven straight from the airport to hospital.
‘We’re probably being overcautious. But there’s no harm in that, is there?’ he said.
‘No. Of course not. I’m sure,’ Alice answered. They had somehow entered a conspiracy of matter-of-factness, in which they both pretended that this was a routine way of ending a holiday.
The flight left, with Margaret and Trevor on board. It was too early yet for Alice to think of going to the hospital to meet them. She washed Pete’s plate and knife and put them away, then walked through the house. It felt slightly unfamiliar, as if she had been away from it for much longer than one night. The arrangements of crockery in cupboards and books on shelves seemed irrelevant, as if already viewed through the distancing membrane of history.
After an hour she couldn’t bear the house’s silence any longer. She locked the front door and went to the Department. A few minutes after she arrived Professor Devine put his head into her office with a question about the minutes of the budgeting meeting. She told him about Margaret and he took off his glasses and replaced them again, a sign of dismay that she knew was habitual without ever having been aware of it before. Everything around her had a lurid clarity that balanced on the edge of nausea.
‘If there is anything Helen and I can do, anything at all,’ the Professor mumbled.
She isn’t dead, Alice thought, while she was gravely accepting his statements of concern. She isn’t going to die.
Eventually, after a long time, Trevor called again. They were in the ambulance. Margaret had taken a turn for the worse on the flight. He didn’t any longer try to suggest that there was nothing to worry about. Their conspiracy now was about getting Margaret to hospital with all speed.
‘I’ll see you there,’ Alice said. She left her office and drove to the hospital, and found a seat in the A&E waiting area. People flurried past her or sat and gazed into space. An ambulance with its blue light lazily flashing arrived under the canopy. The steps at the rear were unfolded but it was a young woman carrying a baby who was helped down and hurried through the doors. Another half-hour dragged by before a long white car with blacked-out windows drew up. A stretcher was rolled out of the back and lifted on to a trolley. Alice glimpsed her mother’s white hair on a blue pillow. She left her seat and ran in pursuit.
Margaret’s eyes seemed twice their normal size. Her face was a parchment triangle that looked too small to contain them and there were purple marks like fresh bruises showing through the skin. She was breathing in fast, shallow gasps. Her hand moved just perceptibly under the red blanket that covered her, and Alice slid her own underneath and took hold of her cold fingers.
‘It’s all right,’ she said gently and the memory came back to her of Trevor using exactly the same intonation when she woke up from some childish nightmare. ‘It’s all right now.’
Margaret’s eyes remained fixed imploringly on hers.
Medical staff crowded into the cubicle. Alice and Trevor retreated together to a short row of chairs. They could see feet and ankles and rubber wheels and metal protruberances beneath the curtain hems of the cubicles facing them. Trevor’s cardigan was buttoned up wrongly, with one button spare at the chest vee and another unmatched over the small swell of his stomach. His white hair stood out round his head and Alice wanted to smooth the wrinkles of freckled skin where it suddenly seemed too loose for his skull.
‘The flight,’ he murmured. ‘I thought…’ His eyes travelled to where Margaret was lying. He had thought that she was going to die. Having seen her mother, the fear didn’t seem irrational to Alice.
‘The doctor will tell us everything.’ It was important to get information and to act on it. She took his hand and found that it was trembling.
She sat still, holding her father’s dry hand and waiting. The hospital setting was completely unfamiliar to her. She had hardly ever been inside one before today. None of them was ever ill. A sheltered life, she thought, aware of it sliding into the past tense. She pressed the soles of her shoes to the mottled grey floor, wondering how it remained motionless when everything was shifting.
At last a doctor came to find them.
‘Mrs Peel almost certainly has a form of pneumonia,’ she said. ‘We are X-raying her now and we’ll do some blood tests.’
Under her married name Margaret sounded like a stranger, Alice thought. She was always Margaret Mather, yes, the Margaret Mather…
‘Can I go to her?’ Trevor asked. There was suddenly a pleading note in his voice. Anxiety scraped away his reserve. It occurred to Alice that she had never been properly aware before of how deeply he loved Margaret. She felt like an eavesdropper outside the walls of her parents’ marriage.
‘We’ll stabilise her first. It’s a matter of making her comfortable.’
They went back to the row of seats and waited. Alice let her father sit quietly. A teenaged girl with her leg propped in front of her was pushed past in a wheelchair. She was wearing school uniform, the navy-blue and cerise of Alice’s old school.
Once, Alice remembered, when she was eleven or twelve, Margaret had come to talk to the school to show one of her celebrated films. She stood up on the stage in the hall beside the rectangle of white screen unrolled in readiness by Mr Gregory, the biology teacher. Her neat navy-blue suit was unremarkable, but she wore it with a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes. The sunlight flooding in from the big window behind her made her hair glint like silver mesh.
‘I am going to take you all on a journey,’ she said. ‘To one of the most remarkable places in the world.’
The blinds were drawn and the lights dimmed.
The film’s images were already familiar to Alice. There were the rookeries of Adélie penguins on rocky headlands of the Antarctic peninsula. Thousands of birds seethed on a narrow rock margin between mirror-silver sea and steep walls of ice and snow. The intense chirring sound made by the birds swelled and filled the hall.
Margaret and her assistant moved through the dense colony, counting the eggs and the chicks. The chicks were newly hatched and the schoolgirl audience gave a collective aaah at the first close-up of a beaky ball of silver-grey down. Margaret stopped the film and continued her crisp commentary.
‘The Adélie breeding season is short. Females lay two eggs apiece but only about sixty per cent of Pygoscelis adeliae chicks reach the crèche stage at the age of three weeks.’
The film started up again and the blunt arc of a brown Antarctic skua swept out of the whitish sky and dived on a chick at the edge of the colony. The morsel of fluff was swallowed whole, head first. For a fraction of a second the tiny feet were visible in the slit of the skua’s bill. The sentimental tendency of the audience dissipated after that.
There were shots of penguins flipping out of the sea between the ribbed flanks of icebergs, like dozens of tiny missiles, intercut with footage of the birds cruising underwater through the spinning maze of krill. Alice knew that Margaret hadn’t used an underwater cameraman; she had dived down into the ice-bound sea to film all this herself. She wanted to nudge her neighbour and tell her so.
‘Adult birds fish for krill, Euphausia crystallorophias in the main, in the rich waters around the continental edge.’
Margaret paid her audience the compliment of never talking down to them and she also had the knack of making them feel that she was sharing the complete experience. Her film included personal footage that was never shown on television. In one sequence she was cooking on a small stove outside her little orange pyramid tent. Her red protective suit and the tent made a dab of colour in an immense blank sweep of white and cobalt blue. In one close-up she looked over her shoulder and laughed straight up at the cameraman. Strands of her pale hair blew across her cheek and stuck there, seeded with ice. Alice drew her knees up against her chest and shivered, as if she were out in the ice herself.
The applause at the end was loud. Mr Gregory came back up on to the stage and thanked Dr Mather for coming to talk to the school. Margaret stood beside him, even in her heels barely reaching up to his shoulder. She looked straight out into the audience and she appeared to be made of different materials and coloured more brightly than the biology teacher or the headmistress who was beaming on her other side. Alice realised now that that was the moment when she understood how sexy her mother was. Margaret was then in her fifties.
Margaret had another lecture to give after her talk to the school and she drove herself away straight afterwards in her green Alfa Romeo with the dented rear wing. Alice was surrounded by a group of girls.
‘Your mum’s rather amazing,’ Becky Gifford said. Becky’s own mother was a television actress, and Becky was the most sophisticated and confident girl in Alice’s year. She had never noticed Alice before.
‘She is a scientist,’ Alice answered, wanting to make clear that that was what was most important.
‘So are you going to be one as well?’
‘Yes,’ Alice told her.
It was probably true, Alice thought, that she owed her friendship with Becky to Margaret and that day.
A nurse came and stood in front of their chairs. ‘You can come and sit with her now,’ she told them. ‘Could you pop these on first? They do up at the back.’ She handed them a blue paper gown apiece. In silence, Alice and Trevor helped each other into the crackling shrouds and did up the ribbon ties at the nape of the neck.
Margaret had been moved to a different cubicle, a glassedin alcove to the side of the department. Beyond the glass partition three other trolley beds had also been drawn up. She was propped up on pillows with a clear plastic mask held to her face by an elastic loop. The mask looked too big for her, as if it might envelop the bones of her jaw and cheek. An intravenous tube was taped to her arm. Her eyes, wide with alarm, fixed on them as they approached.
‘Here we are,’ Trevor said. They moved one to either side of her. The bed immediately beyond the glass was occupied by a young Asian man, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed. ‘Here we are now,’ Trevor repeated.
Alice glanced around and saw a chair across the corridor. She carried it over and placed it for Trevor to sit down. He folded abruptly into it as if his legs were about to give way. He leaned to put his hand on Margaret’s arm and she turned her head to see him better.
After a while she drifted into sleep.
The time passed, minutes divided from minutes by the slow sweep of the second hand of the wall clock directly in Alice’s sightline. She brought her father a bottle of water from a vending machine, but he wouldn’t leave his place for long enough to eat anything.
A nurse came every half-hour to check Margaret’s pulse and temperature. The close-quarters bustle and clattering of the emergency department seemed to reach them through thick layers of close air. The young Asian man was wheeled away by a porter in green overalls and his place was immediately taken by an older man who looked around him in mournful bewilderment. The evening seeped away. Alice thought of the chains of car headlights outside on the bypass and of busy people on their way to somewhere familiar, at the end of an ordinary day.
A different nurse performed the observations, which meant that the night staff had now come on. Alice was just deciding she would insist that Trevor ate some food when Margaret opened her eyes. They focused, in an instant of confusion, then flooded with mute terror. Her free hand came up and clawed at the mask. She dragged it off her face and hoarsely whispered, ‘I’ll suffocate.’ Her Yorkshire vowels were exaggerated: soooffocaaate.
Alice jerked to her feet. ‘No, no, you won’t. It’s helping you to breathe,’ she soothed.
‘Mag? Maggie, darling, you’re all right,’ Trevor murmured.
Her silvery-haloed head rolled on the pillow.
‘Are you there?’ Margaret demanded.
‘Yes,’ they said. Her head turned to Trevor and then the other way, until her eyes connected with Alice’s. Alice had never seen her mother afraid before, but her face was livid with it now. There were beads of sweat on her forehead. She breathed noisily with her mouth open and Alice tried to put the mask back, but Margaret impatiently knocked it away.
‘I want you to do something for me.’ She said it to Alice. Even now she managed a degree of imperiousness but it sounded a cracked note, the tremulous insistence of a frightened child.
‘Of course I will.’
‘I want…’ Margaret took a breath. ‘I want you to go south. To Lewis Sullavan’s station.’
‘I can’t go anywhere, not when you are ill.’
Margaret’s hand twitched on the covers. ‘This isn’t it. Not by a long chalk it isn’t. I’ll be getting over this. But I want you to go, while you can, while you’ve got the chance. For…me. Do it for me.’
Alice understood what she meant, with the clear precision born in the most intense moment of an intense drama. She knew that she would remember this instant and her exact comprehension of her mother’s wishes. There would be no denying or forgetting what was intended.
Margaret was looking at the spectre of her own mortality. She wouldn’t die here, not yet, her will was too strong for that. But she knew, finally and empirically, that her strength was not infinite. And her intention was that her life would be carried forward for her, out on the ice where she had lived it most intensely, by her only child.
Somewhere beyond their glass box a telephone was insistently ringing. Footsteps passed, metal harshly scraped – the sounds they had been hearing for hours. Alice looked at Trevor and saw the mute imprecation in his face. Trevor had never, throughout her life, demanded a single thing of her. All he had done was to love the two of them, his two women. The telephone stopped ringing, then started up again.
‘Of course I’ll go,’ Alice said softly.
The fear in Margaret’s eyes faded, replaced for a moment by a clear sapphire glimmer of triumph. It was Trevor who smudged away tears with the back of his hand.
‘You’ll find details. E-mail, in my e-mail in-box,’ Margaret said.
‘Don’t worry about that now.’
Gently Trevor lifted the plastic mask and fitted it over his wife’s mouth. She nodded her acquiescence and her eyes closed again.
At 10 p.m., when Trevor began to doze with his head on the covers next to Margaret’s hand, a different doctor came to explain regretfully that there would be no place available on the ward before the morning. Margaret herself was now asleep, so Alice drove her father home to Boar’s Hill. She heated up some soup and once they had eaten and she was sure that he had gone to bed, she made up a bed for herself in her old room. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up, as she had done as a child, and looked across at the old books on the white-painted shelves. There was Shackleton’s South, and Fuchs and Hillary’s The Crossing of Antarctica, both of them presents, on different birthdays, from Margaret. She had written Alice’s name and the date on the flyleaf of each. It was as if Alice could see straight through the stiff board covers now, into an Antarctic landscape where the reality of Margaret’s films and the explorers’ stories overlapped with a fantastical realm of ice turrets and rippled snow deserts and blue-lipped crevasses. Tattered veils of snow were chased by the wind and the howling of it rose inside her head, reaching a crescendo in an unearthly shriek that drowned out her mother’s voice and the chirring of the penguins.
And now Antarctica lay in wait for her, with its frozen jaws gaping wide open.
Alice sat upright. Sleep was out of the question. She pulled on her clothes again, shivering in the unheated bedroom, and went downstairs. Margaret’s chair at the gate-legged table in the bay window overlooked a dark void where the garden lay. Alice made herself a mug of tea and sat down at her mother’s computer screen.
Do it, she exhorted herself. You made a promise. Do this much at least, before tomorrow throws any complications in the way.
Alice clicked new message and began to type.
If it was appropriate, and if her understanding of the present situation was correct, following her mother’s serious illness she would be honoured to be considered in her place for membership of the forthcoming European joint expedition to Antarctica.
She attached a list of her scientific qualifications. At the end, against Previous Antarctic Experience, she typed none.
The tea had gone cold but she took a gulp of it anyway. She reread her short message and changed a couple of words, then checked that the address in the box was correct. She typed her own correspondence address and quickly pressed send. The out-box was briefly highlighted before the communication went to an unknown recipient named Beverley Winston, assistant to Lewis Sullavan.
There was nothing else to be done tonight. Alice poured her unfinished tea down the kitchen sink and went back to bed. She lay still under the familiar weight of the covers. She thought of her own bed in the house in Jericho and wondered where Pete was tonight. Only a little time ago they had woken up in the same bed with nothing more than a kiss glimpsed at a party to separate them.
Now there was the prospect of half a world.
The acceleration of change seemed to open a pit beneath her. Opening her eyes again to counter another bout of nausea, Alice examined the contours of her room. She had lived a remarkably sheltered life. As she saw it now, she had made an almost stately progression from childhood to today. In Margaret’s shadow and under her father’s benign protection she had done what was expected of her and what she expected of herself. No more, nothing more than just what was expected.
And now, without Pete and with her mother’s shadow shortened, there was this.
Suddenly, beneath her ribcage, Alice Peel felt a sharp stab of anticipation that shocked her with its ecstatic greed.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_ba74c0ec-f1a7-52ce-b51f-3511ff3af383)
With the steady approach of summer the pack ice in the scoop of bay was slowly, grudgingly, breaking up. This morning the ice was a dirty ivory colour, glinting here and there like polished bone. The expanding streaks of water were black and pewter grey under a matching sky, and a thin veil of ice fog hung over the cliffs that formed the opposite wall of the bay. Idle flakes of snow spun in the still air, floating upwards as well as down.
Rooker replaced the engine casing of the skidoo and twisted the ignition key. The machine obligingly coughed and roared, and Valentin Petkov, the glaciologist, glanced back from where he was placing bamboo wands and marker flags out on the ice and gave a thumbs-up. The field assistant, Philip Idwal Jones, was nearby, coiling a rope. He finished it with a loop, slung it over his shoulder and trudged back through the snow.
‘Hey. Rook.’ The shout carried clearly in the silence. ‘Time for a brew?’
Rooker pulled back the cuff of his glove to check his watch. It was midday and they had been out since 8 a.m. Petkov was keen to set up his markers and take the first set of readings. This part of his study, as Rooker understood it, was to do with comparing the speed of travel of the margins of the ice with the centre. If you could call it speed, he reflected, at the rate of millimetres per year.
Philip reached the skidoo, dropped his rope and took off his fleece cap to scratch at his spikes of black hair. He had a patchy black beard to match. Phil was only twenty-six but he had been travelling and climbing since he was seventeen. This was his third Antarctic season. As a mountain guide it was his job to assist the scientists in their fieldwork and at the same time to make sure they didn’t fall down a crevasse or off a cliff.
‘Piece of cake, I don’t think,’ he had confided to Rooker. ‘That French bird thinks she knows it all, du’n’t she?’
Rooker liked him.
‘Ta,’ Phil said now when Rooker passed him a thermos of coffee. ‘Phew. Warm, innit?’
It was, compared with a week ago, when they had first arrived. Daytime temperatures then had hovered around –23°C, with a heavy wind chill. Today it was a mild and summery –5°C.
‘D’you think Valerie’s going to take a break?’ Phil wondered, looking over at Petkov who was still zigzagging across the glacier. Phil maintained that Valentin wasn’t a name at all, just a card you sent to your girlfriend if you remembered and could be bothered, and insisted instead on Val, which he then back-formed to Valerie. No one could be less effeminate than Valentin. He had a rich bass voice and a barrel chest, and a fondness for whisky and jokes whose punchlines didn’t always survive the shift from Bulgarian into English. There were six different first languages at Kandahar Station, but English was the common tongue.
‘Dead common,’ Phil had inevitably quipped in his thick Welsh accent.
He beckoned to Valentin by waving a mug in a wide arc. It was hard to judge distances across the bland, grey-white face of the glacier. Only over to their left, where it suddenly tipped downhill and spilled towards the ice and the sea, splitting into a chaotic mass of seracs and twisted crevasses on the way, did its scale become more legible.
Phil sighed when the scientist cheerily waved back, either not understanding or not wanting to stop work.
‘Daft Bulgar. I’ll have to take it over there. Give us one of those butties, mate.’ He took the thermos and a wrapped sandwich, and headed off across the snow again.
The skidoo had been tending to stall on the way out from the base. Rooker had found and cleared a blockage in the fuel line. He sat on the machine now, leaning back against the handlebars with his feet up on the seat. When he had looked into the radio room this morning, Niki had told him that the warm and windless weather heralded a storm. Nikolai Pocius was the radio operator, a gaunt Lithuanian communications genius who had spent ten years in the Russian army. Niki was probably right, but it was hard to believe it in this moment of perfect stillness. When he closed his eyes, apart from the faint breath of cold on his face, Rooker thought he could be in a vacuum. The depth of silence was crystalline and absolute, without the smallest possibility – a certainty anywhere else in the world – that it would be shattered in the next second by a jet passing overhead or a burst of distorted music or the whine of traffic.
Apart from the nine people currently occupying the two huts on a small bluff that made up Kandahar Station, the nearest human habitation was at Santa Ana, a Chilean base that lay 120 miles further up the peninsula. The Chileans maintained a snow ski-way for fixed-wing aircraft, and the Kandahar personnel had flown in there and then been transferred by helicopter to Kandahar. In partnership with the Chileans, Lewis Sullavan had leased for the summer season a pair of New Zealand-owned Squirrel helicopters with two Kiwi pilots and a mechanic. The machines and their crews would be based up at Santa Ana, but they would be available to transport Kandahar scientists out to field locations too remote to be reached by skidoo and sledge. Rooker envied the pilots. He would have liked to fly over the wilderness of glaciers, watching and trying to secondguess the extreme weather, but there was no chance of that. His fixed-wing licence was out of date and he had only flown a helicopter a handful of times.
The silence expanded and thickened around him. He could feel it almost as a physical mass pressing inwards against his eardrums. In the ten days since they had arrived here, the peace had soothed him. He escaped outside as often as he could.
The hut was crowded. He found it difficult to live at such close quarters with the disparate group that Shoesmith had assembled here. Dr Richard Shoesmith was the expedition leader. Rooker had taken an instinctive and immediate dislike to him, but the rest of them were mostly all right. It was the mass function that he recoiled from. People were always talking, trying to make themselves heard above the hum of the other voices. They wanted to make their mark, all of them. Even the jokes were often about scoring points off someone else, or about forming miniature alliances. Sometimes the spectacle touched him, at other times he laughed with everyone else, but he found it impossible to join in properly. The layers that protected him had thickened to the point of impermeability.
Since he had left Edith behind he had grown accustomed to being alone. Before that even, a long time before that, he had stopped looking for company, except for sex or for someone to drink with. He drank on base, of course, although Shoesmith didn’t allow private supplies of alcohol. There was always drinking company, as there was everywhere else in the world. Neither Phil nor Valentin took any notice of the prohibition either. But Rooker didn’t want to know about their lives outside Kandahar, or to know what they dreamed of or hoped for. They didn’t ask him about his life and that suited him perfectly.
Outside, alone, he felt comfortable. The play of light constantly amazed him. The quality of it could change ten times in an hour, going from milky translucence to blade-sharp clarity to a thick yellow glow. He would sit on a rock with his hands hanging loose between his knees, almost oblivious to the cold, just watching.
McMurdo, the American base on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, had been nothing like this. In the summer season McMurdo could house over a thousand people. It had bars and buses and a constant round of parties, and he looked back on it now as just a more boring and much harsher version of Ushuaia. It had been too populous and insulated for him to feel the powerful presence of the ice, and because he had been working as a shuttle-bus driver he had had few reasons ever to go beyond the base and the airfield. Unless it was over to drink with the Kiwis on Scott Base a couple of miles away. But it was lucky that he had worked that meaningless long-ago season, because it was the magic phrase ‘previous experience’ that had secured him this job. He had been taken on by Sullavan and Richard Shoesmith to manage transport, and to act as base mechanic and maintenance man.
That was easy enough. Rooker was good with machinery. He had almost five months ahead of him now, and all he had to do was drive the Zodiac, fix skidoos, and keep the water and the generators running. He felt, at long last, that he had travelled far enough. No one would try to reach him or come pushing up against him here, nudging him for reasons or responses. At McMurdo, planes were constantly landing or taking off. There was always the lure of other destinations. But here, unless a helicopter came in from Santa Ana or a ship arrived in the bay, no one could arrive or leave. Including himself.
He could keep a certain distance from the eight other people. He had a corner that he could curtain off in one of the men’s four-bunk pit rooms, and outside there was always the mercurial light and the silence that was only ever shattered by the wind.
No, he suddenly remembered, it would soon be nine, not eight.
Nine people, because there was another scientist arriving today.
Shoesmith had made one of his ponderous announcements over breakfast: ‘As most of you already know, Dr Alice Peel, from Oxford, will be arriving later today. Please do everything you can to make her welcome.’
Jochen van Meer, the station’s medical doctor, had raised his thick blond eyebrows and grinned across the table at the other men. ‘It will be a pleasure.’
Eight, nine, Rooker thought. It made no difference.
A shadow flicked over his closed eyelids and he sat up to see what it was. A big brown skua gull had landed a yard away, and now it cocked its head and gazed at him. The skuas ringed the rocks outside the door of the base, scavenging for scraps of food, and they quickly learned to follow the sledges further afield. He rummaged in the zipped pocket of his parka, found a lint-coated square of chocolate and threw it to the bird. There was a snap and the fragment disappeared into the hooked beak.
The radio crackled in his inner pocket. Shoesmith’s voice broke out of the buzz of static. ‘Base, this is Kandahar Base, Base to Rooker. Over.’
‘Copy you,’ Rooker replied.
Everything about Shoesmith, including his radio manner, was irritating.
As soon as they met, at the hotel in Punta Arenas before the flight south, Rooker knew that Shoesmith had the English public schoolboy’s conviction that what he did was right because it was always done that way. He had confidence, it seemed to Rooker, but it wasn’t rooted in competence or insight.
The trouble was that his voice, his manner, even his pink, handsome face, reminded Rooker of Henry Jerrold of Northumberland, England, whom he wanted to forget for ever.
Rooker listened to the leader’s instructions. While the glaciology team was working, Richard wanted him to come back to base with the skidoo and ferry the French biologist to one of her penguin colonies. After that, the supply ship was due. Rooker was to take the Zodiac out through the loose ice to meet the new arrival and bring her ashore.
‘Roger,’ he said.
He fired up the skidoo and the skua launched itself away in a long, confident glide. Rook nosed his way back along their outward ski tracks until he reached the point closest to the others, then dismounted and plodded across to tell them where he was going. His boots sank almost to the ankles in the soft snow cloaking the ice.
‘You are not leaving us out here the whole night with no more than one sandwich?’ Valentin laughed.
‘Don’t you fret, Val, we can walk home, no problem. It’s Rook who’ll have to worry when we do get in,’ Phil threatened.
He left them to their flagging, uncoupled the sledge and raced the skidoo back to base. The outward journey had been slow because he and Phil had stopped to test the snow ahead with a long probe wherever there was a shadow or a dip. Too many dogs and sledges and even men had vanished from history into the bowels of the ice for it to be worth taking any risks. But now he drove at full speed, bouncing along with the cold stinging his cheeks and the front skis skimming in the safe tramlines of their exploratory journey. The trail stretched ahead, a thin smudge winding into the blank distance. Exhilaration curved his mouth into a wide grin.
The base was six miles away. As he came over the last rise Rooker saw it lying ahead of him in a sheltered bay, two tiny carmine-red dots against a sweep of snow with the pack ice and a tongue of inky water as a backdrop. Escarpments of exposed rock rose on either side, and behind the base the sloping snowfield was crowned with a towering rock outcrop that marked the margin of the glacier. At the closed end of the bay another tongue of the glacier tumbled in vicious blocks and gashes down to sea level.
He made a wide circuit round the jumbled mass of rock and roared down the slope towards the huts. He could see a little red-jacketed figure crossing the isthmus of snow between the living quarters and the lab hut.
Rooker swept the skidoo in a circle and left it under a makeshift shelter at the rear of the huts. One of his extra assignments was to build a proper housing, using the wooden frame materials left by the supply ship at the beginning of the season. The sky had darkened to solid slate-grey and he noticed that the wind was rising now. Tiny eddies of snow chased around his feet.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Shoesmith said superfluously. He was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table in the middle of the living area with a mass of papers spread out in front of him. The only other work area at Kandahar was at the narrow benches in the chilly lab and most people preferred to do their less demanding work in the warmth of the communal area.
At the far end of the room, where a pair of windows looked out on the snow hill, the base manager, Russell Amory, and Niki were crowded in the kitchen. Niki was peeling potatoes in a metal bowl and Russ was making bread. Rooker thought that one of the best features of life at Kandahar was Russ Amory’s bread.
The two men looked like one another’s opposites. Niki was immensely tall and cadaverously thin. He had long, unkempt hair and a wispy beard that didn’t hide his hollow cheeks, and when he laughed his honking laugh the tight skin and thin lips pulled away from bad teeth that looked as if one more headshake would jerk them loose from the gums. Russell was short and suntanned and completely bald except for a band of fuzz above his ears. Today a white apron was stretched round his middle, emphasising his broad belly.
Russ and Nikolai didn’t pause in their peeling and kneading. Niki twitched his wrist and sent a long coil of potato peel spiralling down into the bowl.
‘Where is Laure? Is she ready?’ Rooker asked from the doorway. He didn’t want to spend time getting out of his boots and outer clothes if he was going straight outside again, and Russ never appreciated people trampling snow and grit over the linoleum floors.
As if to answer him the Frenchwoman, Laure Heber, emerged from the door of the women’s pit room. She had a full backpack in one hand and a pair of insulated boots in the other. The other three men all looked up.
‘Merci, Jeem,’ she smiled. ‘Tout prêt.’
Laure’s shiny dark hair was cut in a tidy bob. She wore pearl studs in her ears and even her fleece tops were flatteringly shaped to show off her long neck. Compared with the eight men on the base she was a miracle of personal grooming. She didn’t talk very much, but her tendency to raise one eyebrow whenever anyone else was speaking gave her an air of detachment and scepticism. There was a rota for everyone to take a day’s responsibility for cooking meals and cleaning the living areas, and on Laure’s day she had served boeuf bourguignonne garnished with chopped herbs and a tarte tatin. The men had wolfed it all down. Jochen van Meer had kissed his fingertips at her. The big Dutchman had also made a point of helping her with the washing-up afterwards while the others drew up their chairs to watch a DVD of The Matrix.
Now she took her windpants and red parka off the hook by the door tagged ‘Heber’ and began pulling them on. She said to Rooker, ‘Jochen is coming to the rookery as well. He will help with netting the birds. You can take two of us?’
‘Sure,’ Rooker answered. Laure was tiny. It would mean squeezing up a bit, but he didn’t think Jochen would mind that.
On cue, van Meer popped out of the opposite bunk-room door. The living area at Kandahar was very small. Someone was always crossing purposefully from bunk room to bathroom or from kitchen to front door. It was like one of those stage farces, Rook thought, but without the comedy.
Beside the front door was a whiteboard, with a list of surnames and a box beside each name. A tick in the box indicated that you were safely on the base. If you were going beyond the immediate environs you wrote down your destination and estimated time of return. It was Phil’s job, and also Rook’s as deputy safety officer, to monitor the status of the board. He ran his eye over it now, thumbed out the line that declared he was assisting on the Spaatz Glacier, scribbled ‘transport SW rookery’ instead and added his initials. He would be back, he estimated, within the hour.
At the bottom of the list there was a new name: ‘Peel’.
Laure and Jochen followed suit. Jochen picked up a radio from the shelf next to the whiteboard. ‘TBC’ on the board indicated that they would need return transport, time to be confirmed by radio link.
‘You’ll be back, Rooker, to make the pick-up from the ship?’ Richard reminded him. The two scientists, heavy with packs and boots and outer clothes, were clumping out of the door.
‘Barring accidents,’ Rook said flatly and followed them.
Niki whistled softly as he tipped potatoes into a pan.
Thick black clouds had massed right across the sky. The snow was now the same luminous pearl as Laure’s ear studs, and it looked almost as smooth. Ridges and hollows were robbed of their contours and the wind was whipping an opaque shroud off the soft surface, making Rook frown through his goggles and lean forward in concentration as he brought the skidoo round. Ducking their heads against the stinging air, Laure and Jochen piled their rucksacks into the rear pannier and Laure climbed on behind Rook. He felt her slither along the seat, and the light pressure of her hips and thighs closing against his as Jochen swung on the back. The skidoo settled under their weight. Rook checked over his shoulder. He twisted the throttle grip so they surged forward, and he felt Laure pressing closer still as her arms fastened round his waist. She dipped her head behind the shelter of his back to keep the wind out of her face, resting her cheek against his spine.
‘Hold tight, won’t you?’ The touch of warning sarcasm was wasted as the wind tore the words out of his mouth and hurled them away.
They had made the fifteen-minute journey to the Adélie penguin rookery several times before. Rook accelerated, with tiny snowflakes driving pinpricks into the narrow band of skin left exposed between his goggles and hood.
The Adélie colony consisted of more than a thousand breeding pairs. The males had come ashore first, hopping and sliding on their long journey from the outer margins of the ice where they had spent the winter, all of them heading for the exposed rocks where a nest of stones could be built. The females had followed them for the brief mating season, and their pairs of eggs would soon be deposited amongst the stones. Rook stopped the skidoo a hundred yards short of the rocks, and first Jochen and then Laure dismounted. Jochen shouldered his bag but Rook hoisted Laure’s and carried it for her. It was extremely heavy, he noted. She gave him a quick smile of gratitude from under the peak of her parka hood.
As they crested the rise, the noise of the rookery burst on them. It was a solid and constant chorus of guttural chirring. The rocks seethed with a black-and-white tide as late arrivals searched for last year’s mates or for new partners, and new nest builders tried to thieve stones from established pairs. There was a flurry of flippers and beaks everywhere, covering every inch of rock. The smell was as powerful as the noise. It was a piquant mixture of fish and oil and guano, and it permeated the clothes and hair and even the skin of anyone who ventured near. One night at the base, after a day’s work at the rookery, Laure had buried her face in her gloves and exclaimed ‘Parfum de pingouin’ with as much delight as if it were Chanel No. 5. She loved everything about penguins and Rook liked her for that. He could hardly distinguish what the other scientists specialised in. Especially Shoesmith. Shoesmith was the most bloodless man he had ever met. He sat over his papers as impassively as if he were carved out of wax.
Rook carried Laure’s pack to the point a few yards from the colony’s edge where a hump in the snow made a small vantage point. He was happy to help her, but he also liked seeing the penguins. There was a whole miniature universe of greed and ambition and devotion and determination crowded on this expanse of rock at the bottom of the world.
As he watched, one bird turned its back on its perfunctory nest, and instantly two rivals filched a stone apiece and dropped them into their adjacent nests. The original owner turned back and made a threatening flurry in each direction, beak wide with outrage. As Rook stood there, three apparently unmated birds marched across the snow to investigate him. They came fearlessly up to the toes of his boots, then stood with their flippers slightly akimbo. They turned their heads to gaze at him, their white-ringed eyes unblinking. After a minute one of them sank down on to its front as if exhausted by the effort of curiosity.
Laure and Jochen unpacked the equipment. At this stage the task was to map the nest sites and ring-mark some of the birds. Later in the season, once the chicks were hatched and established, Laure would take feather and blood samples from her ringed birds for DNA analysis back in Paris. One of her studies, Rook had learned, related to the amount of heavy metals and toxic elements accumulated in the birds’ feathers. The annual accumulation of pollutants could be measured and so provide a precise bio-indicator of new pollution levels on the subcontinent.
This was the gist of what she had told him one night at dinner, in her perfect English. In spite of himself he was interested. To emphasise something about penguin behaviour that particularly intrigued her she would rest her hand lightly on his arm.
It had become accepted that everyone sat in the same places every night, so now Laure was always on his right and Phil on his left. Shoesmith presided at the table’s head, of course.
Laure had her net. She made a quiet circuit past the nests of birds she had already marked, then deftly swooped on a bird quietly sitting with its back to her. Once it was netted, she slipped a hood over its head. The extinguishing of daylight fooled it into lying still, she had explained to Rook, and she could either ring its leg or fire a microchip into a flipper. Jochen followed behind her, an eager assistant, and they moved deeper into the penguin universe.
Rooker would have liked to stay longer out here, watching the birds, but there was the ship and the new arrival. Of course, Russ or Shoesmith himself could have taken the Zodiac out, but whereas Shoesmith was flexible with the other members of the expedition he seemed to expect Rooker to do everything that fell within his area of responsibility, without assistance from anyone else. So he checked the radio link with Jochen and then left them to their work.
As he came over the headland, Rooker saw the supply ship already gliding towards the mouth of the bay. It was only a small cargo vessel with an ugly high prow and a squat bridge tower, but it looked huge against the black water and the white-draped cliffs. The cabin and mast lights made a glittering garland in so much emptiness.
The sea was getting choppy in the wind, with ice rattling and churning in the swell. It wouldn’t be an easy journey in the inflatable. It would have been much better if the ship could have come closer in to shore, but the bay was too shallow. It was one of the reasons why the British had withdrawn from Kandahar. There was no deep-water landing in the summer season, and in winter the sea froze and the base became inaccessible by ship.
Either he made the pick-up right now, Rook thought, or the new arrival would have to stay on the ship until after the storm.
As he passed the radio room at one end of the lab hut he heard Niki’s voice.
‘MV Polar Star, MV Polar Star, this is Kandahar Station. Do you read me? Over.’
The laconic voice of the ship’s radio op crackled back. Rook waited until Niki pushed his headset aside and gave him the thumbs up.
‘The lady waits for you.’
Rook tramped to the main hut and exchanged his parka for a huge orange float suit. To fall into these ice-bound waters without protection would mean death within minutes. As he zipped himself in he saw that the table was laid for tea with Russell’s fresh loaf, jam and a plate of chocolate cupcakes. Shoesmith was hovering nearby while Russ and Arturo, the precise little Spanish climatologist, pulled on chest-high waders.
‘We’ll give you a hand, mate,’ Russ said.
Rooker took a spare life-vest. The three of them scrambled down the rocks to the shingle beach and ran over the jumble of ice and snow to the floating jetty where the Zodiac was tethered. It strained against the moorings as waves smashed around it. With Rook aboard, Russ and Arturo waited for a lull, then rushed the black inflatable out into waist-deep water. Rook lowered the outboard and to his relief it fired at the first pull. He was already broadside to the waves racing into the bay. A big one rushed at him and almost tipped the Zodiac over. He brought the boat round into the wind and opened the throttle. The inflatable roared forward, the prow lifting as high as his head as it breasted the waves, and ice and scudding water punched the rubber floor as he headed for the bay mouth.
The air was thick with spray and sea mist and gouts of snow. He turned on the powerful lamp he had brought with him and scanned the mass of heaving water for the ship. He caught sight of the masts pitching in the distance and drove steadily towards the lights.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_767b269d-5a12-5f9b-ba35-31127c85dd59)
Alice stood at the ship’s rail with her kitbags at her feet. She had spotted the station in the distance – it was nothing more than a pair of reddish specks marooned against a vast expanse of hostile emptiness. Then the clouds of snow and fog closed in again to obliterate even that much.
The breadth of the land’s desolation made her feel afraid, even though she had been longing for this moment ever since the ship had left Chile. She had been abjectly seasick for three days. The only glimpse she had caught of the Antarctic coast, when it finally appeared out of seas as high as mountains, had been through her cabin porthole. Yet now the moment had come to leave the little ship and the friendly Spanish crew, she was full of misgivings. She clamped her hands on the icy rail. The base looked so tiny and she knew just how remote it was. More than three days’ sailing to reach the southernmost tip of a distant continent again, then twenty-four hours of flying to reach home.
Two sailors lowered the flight of metal steps at the ship’s side. As the ship rolled, the platform at the bottom plunged under several feet of glassy water, then it rocked up again with spray cascading off it. One of the sailors drew a finger across his throat and winked at her. Weakly, Alice smiled back.
Over the drumming of the ship’s engines, she caught the higher-pitched note of another engine. At the same moment a nimbus of light formed in the white murk. The sailors ran down the heaving steps as confidently as if they had been a set of stairs in Benidorm. On the platform they unhitched ropes and waited. A black dinghy, pitched at a threatening angle, materialised behind the smear of light. A big man in orange waterproofs swept the tiller in an arc, the boat crested a wave and landed neatly at the foot of the steps.
One sailor made it fast to the steps, so that ship and Zodiac rolled in unison. Waves swept over the dinghy and the platform, and ice-clogged water cascaded everywhere. The other sailor ran nimbly up the steps again, grabbed Alice’s luggage and yelled ‘Vamos!’ at her. She let go of the railings.
The metal treads were steep and slippery. With Spanish instructions and the boatman’s terse commands both unintelligible through the din of engines and surf, she half scrambled and half slithered down to the platform. Water immediately submerged it. The man’s orange arm grabbed her and hoisted as the dinghy flew upwards like a fairground ride. On the downwards plunge Alice launched herself with a sob of panic on to the dinghy’s floor. Her bags tumbled in after her and some nets of more-or-less-fresh vegetables.
The ropes snaked away and the Zodiac roared free from the ship’s flank.
With his eyes on the white wave caps, the boatman kicked a red life-vest towards where Alice was cowering amongst the bags of onions and peppers. The water’s cold sucked all the breath out of her. ‘Put that on,’ he shouted without taking his eyes off the sea.
She struggled to get her arms through the holes and fasten the clasps across her chest. A rogue wave broke amidships and icy spray stung her face. Even though she was wearing weatherproofs she felt she was soaked to the skin. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Behind her there were two long blasts on the ship’s hooter. Up on the bridge the captain and the mate were wishing the English scientist bon voyage.
The dinghy man loomed above her with his feet braced, one hand on the tiller, the other clasping a radio. He shouted again and Alice thought she caught the words five minutes. She huddled on the floor of the dinghy and prayed that they would either be ashore or dead within that time. She didn’t even care which, so long as it was fast.
The Zodiac and the waves raced each other to the shore. She had never been so far from home or felt the effects of distance so acutely. Nor had she ever been so apprehensive of what lay ahead of her.
It had happened with bewildering speed. It was barely a month since she had arrived at Lewis Sullavan’s London headquarters to be interviewed by Dr Richard Shoesmith.
The walls of the Sullavanco foyer were hung with representations of Sullavan newspaper front pages cast in bronze and television screens showed Sullavan TV programmes from around the world. There were three receptionists with identical smiles behind a long curved reception desk made of polished wood.
‘The Polar Office? You’ll find it on the fifth floor, if you’ll take the lift behind you.’
The lift was one of the kind that slides up a glass tube mounted on the outside of the building and which always tended to give her vertigo. The carpet of the fifth-floor corridor seemed to rise up to meet her as she stepped out and she steadied herself with one hand against the inner wall.
The Polar Office receptionist sat behind another sleek expanse of curved wood. There was an arrangement of hot-orange flowers at one end of it that made Alice think of Margaret.
‘Dr Shoesmith shouldn’t keep you too long,’ the receptionist said.
A secretary brought Alice a cup of coffee while she waited. This was all so mutedly but distinctly high-rent that it made her smile. It couldn’t have been further from the dowdy clutter of the Department of Geology, or any other academic institution she had ever known. If the Polar Office was anything to go by, Kandahar Station would have an indoor swimming pool and a resident manicurist.
Dr Richard Shoesmith did keep her waiting – a full twenty minutes. When he finally emerged from his inner office Alice saw a compact man perhaps ten years older than herself. He was noticeably good-looking, but there were pale vertical furrows etched between his eyebrows that stood out against his weather-beaten skin. When they shook, his hand enveloped hers. He looked fit and slightly out of place in the plush Sullavan offices.
‘I’m sorry, Dr Peel. I was talking to the French. They maintain a full research programme of their own down south, as you know. There are Antarctic politics, as there are politics everywhere else in the world.’
‘Yes.’ Alice smiled.
They sat down, Shoesmith behind his desk, and Alice to one side and in a slightly lower chair.
‘You have no previous Antarctic experience,’ he began.
‘None,’ she said steadily.
He looked through a neat sheaf of documents. She could see that there were offprints of some her published research papers, a copy of the full academic CV she had submitted at the request of Beverley Winston, Lewis Sullavan’s assistant. There was also an excellent reference provided by Professor Devine.
‘Hmm. Doctoral studies, carbonate sedimentary rocks, western Turkey. Lecturer in sedimentology, University of Oxford…proposed area of study…mapping, stratigraphic survey and dating of sedimentary rock formations in the vicinity of…Yes.’ Richard looked up abruptly and his eyes held Alice’s. His gaze was unblinking. ‘Lewis is very eager to have you join the expedition.’
Cautiously, Alice nodded.
‘Perhaps you could give me your own reasons.’
She looked straight back at him. She would have to be honest. ‘The enthusiast was originally my mother. She was, is…’
‘Yes, I know who your mother is.’
Of course he did.
There was a small silence. Shoesmith was still waiting. Alice added softly, ‘I have thought about it a great deal since the suggestion was first made.’
The truth was that an entirely unexpected desire had taken hold of her.
It wasn’t to do with geological research, although her academic appetite for the new realm of Antarctic rock was beginning to grow. It wasn’t even for Margaret’s sake, although of course that was a part of it. It was much more that she wanted to push out from the secure corner of her own life, the place that her crumbled illusions about Peter had left dusty and unpopulated, and to turn disappointment into discovery.
All her knowledge of the south was second-hand, straitjacketed by book covers or seen through the tunnel of a camera lens. There was none of her own history in it, although its history surrounded her. She had been keeping her mind closed to it for years, until Margaret and Lewis Sullavan together had opened a door. And now the very remoteness and the blank page that it would offer had begun to draw her, as forcibly as they had once repelled.
She began to dream of Antarctica, vivid dreams painted in ice colours and scoured with blizzards. She woke up from these dreams relieved to find herself in her own bed and yet impatient with the confines of ordinary life.
Beyond the shaded windows of the Polar Office lay the olive-green river, threaded by tourist boats and police launches, and the dome of St Paul’s and the busy bridges, the complicated and familiar web of London. Alice thought of the roads leading away from the centre, skeins of motorways passing the airports, the route that would take her back to Oxford, to the quiet house in Jericho where Pete no longer lived, and all the other avenues and niches of a populated world. Was going to Antarctica just running away from the overfamiliar, from the present disappointment of reality?
No one who went to the ice ever came back unchanged: Alice had heard that often enough, even from Margaret, the arch-unsentimentalist. Probably everyone who found themselves drawn south was on the run from someone, or something, and that included Richard Shoesmith. But she was running towards it too, faster and faster every day. The sound of her own footsteps pounded a drumbeat rhythm in her head.
She was ready to be changed.
Richard Shoesmith was waiting for her answer.
Alice felt her legs shaking and the palms of her hands grew damp. She crossed her ankles in the opposite direction and let her hands lie composedly in her lap, but even so she was sure he read the unscientific glitter in her eyes. She didn’t think Shoesmith missed much. ‘I want to see it for myself,’ she said.
‘Go on, please.’
Knowing that this was not the time to mention dreams of ice, or of running anywhere, she talked about European scientific co-operation, Antarctic geopolitics and the unrivalled opportunity to undertake valuable research. The words were measured, but eagerness coloured them and her voice shivered just audibly with absolute longing.
Richard Shoesmith took all of this in. His expression didn’t change as he listened to her, but some of the rigidity seemed to melt out of him.
‘It is a chance that any geologist would jump at, Dr Peel. A complete field season, automatic full funding, the opportunity to make your mark as part of a team at a brand-new station.’
‘Yes. I do appreciate that.’
He picked up a smooth ovoid rock from his desktop and meditatively turned it in his fingers. Embedded in the dark siltstone Alice could see the pale, distinct bullet shape of a Jurassic belemnite. ‘Because of the nature of our present funding, in the selection of personnel for this expedition there is an inevitable element of, how shall I put it, who you are and whom you know?’
He was looking down at the fossil, not at her.
Alice smiled before she said delicately, ‘I think we both understand that.’
Because she knew about Richard Shoesmith, just as he knew about her and her mother’s reputation.
Shoesmith was a famous name, but not by reason of Richard’s own achievements. He was a palaeontologist. He had completed his PhD at Cardiff, had done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, held a research post at Warwick and was currently Reader in Palaeontology there. She had pulled out some of his papers and read them attentively. He had done some new work on evolution and extinction of certain cephalopods and gastropods at the end of the Cretaceous, but he didn’t have a big reputation in his field.
His grandfather, however, was Gregory Shoesmith.
As a twenty-two-year-old alpinist, poet and gentleman botanist, Gregory had been one of the youngest members of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition. As an explorer he had acquitted himself with quiet bravery and dignity, and Mount Shoesmith, the majestic peak overlooking the Beardmore Glacier, was named after him. But it was for his poem, ‘Remember This, When I Am Best Forgotten’, that he was famous. For every schoolchild of the last century it was the epitaph for the heroic age of polar exploration.
Gregory came home from the ice with what was left of Scott’s expedition and had almost immediately enlisted. He survived the entire war and was awarded the VC. He was widowed while he was still a young man, then married again in his forties. His second wife had three children and the youngest of these, a career soldier, was Richard Shoesmith’s father. As the child of a services family Richard had seen his father’s postings all over the world, but mostly he had grown up in English boarding schools.
This much Alice knew as fact. She also knew by intuition that she and Richard Shoesmith suffered in common the sun and shadow effect of their family reputations. For Lewis Sullavan it made perfect sense to have Gregory Shoesmith’s grandson leading his first expedition, just as it would to have Margaret Mather’s daughter amongst the scientists. Who you are, as Richard put it, provided them both with enviable opportunities. And the two of them had always to live without the certainty that what they did achieve was on their own merits.
Richard put down the belemnite stone but his fingers still rested on it, as if for reassurance. He considered for a moment, then seemed to reach a decision. ‘Are you free to travel south at this short notice? Most of the members will be at Kandahar by the middle of October.’
A little more than two weeks’ time.
Alice thought quickly. ‘My mother has been very ill recently, but she’s recovering. She would be there herself if it were possible and because it isn’t she very much wants me to go in her place. Apart from my parents, I don’t have any other ties. I could be at Kandahar in a month’s time, if that would be acceptable.’
A silence fell. With his head turned to the city view of towers and cranes, and his fingers minutely caressing the stone, Richard was thinking. On the wall behind him was a framed aerial photograph of a slice of Antarctic coastline. It was a black-and-white image in which the sea was inky black and the mainland mountain peaks stood out in stark whiteness, ribbed with shadows almost as black and deep as the waters. In the fretted indentations of U-shaped bays, ice showed up in milky swirls as diaphanous as torn muslin. At such a distance the treacherous glaciers looked as innocuous as wrinkled skin on some great cooling and congealing milk pudding. Somewhere, on that peninsular margin between black water and white ice, lay Kandahar Station.
‘As I told you, Lewis is strongly in favour of your joining us. And I would be happy to accede to that.’
She thought that this cool assurance was the last word, but then he surprised her.
‘I love Antarctica with all my heart. I’ve always loved it, first the idea and then the reality. It’s the only place, the only thing I have ever known that is always more beautiful than its admirers can convey, more seductive and more dangerous than its reputation allows. You can never forget it, and it never releases its hold on you. I hope that it will come to be just as important to you.’
‘I hope so too,’ Alice said. And then she smiled. It was her wide, infrequent and startlingly brilliant smile. ‘Thank you.’
Richard coughed and turned his attention to a separate set of papers on his tidy desk. ‘However, there are a number of things you will need to do before you can definitely join us. Medical and dental check-ups, and so forth. Beverley Winston will arrange for you to be kitted out with polar gear. Everything is supplied, with the Sullavan Company logo as well as the EU flag. You will also have to do some basic survival training. The British Antarctic Survey people have kindly agreed to provide that for our UK members, in the spirit of European unity and cooperation.’ He smiled drily.
‘At such short notice you may not have the opportunity to meet the other members of the expedition together, or even individually, before we all reach Kandahar. We’re a farflung group, geographically speaking. Which is part of the idea, of course – not to gather a little coterie of chums who were all at Cambridge together.’
Richard Shoesmith didn’t belong to any such coterie, Alice understood. Nor did Lewis Sullavan.
‘We shall be a full-season core of just ten people in all. Six scientists, including yourself, and four support staff.’
She read the list of names that he passed across the desk to her.
Eight people she didn’t yet know, with whom she would spend five months in a hut perched on the white margin at the distant end of the earth. Outside, in London, toy boats were plying their way up and down the river, and taxis were being hailed to take businessmen to lunch.
‘Six nationalities,’ Richard said. ‘Seven, if you count Welsh. This is not a huge Antarctic research station like McMurdo or even Rothera. We shall be pioneers on an old base and we’ll set out with no rules except safety regulations. We are there to help one another and to cooperate in everything from science to international understanding to cleaning the base kitchen. If there is a job that needs to be done, any job whatsoever, you will be expected to help out with it.’
A slow flush darkened Richard’s already ruddy cheeks. He was moved by the thought of this, of their tightly knit and multinational group working together outside the common conventions, and Alice found that she was touched in response.
‘You know your polar history? Of course you do. You know that Amundsen’s bid for the Pole was for Norway’s sake. It was a matter of national ambition and pride. Whereas Scott wanted the Pole, of course, but the real reason for his expeditions, the ideal that he and his team all fought and risked their lives for, was scientific exploration and discovery. We shall also be there for science’s sake.’
She understood that Richard Shoesmith was a scientist through and through. He would be a meticulous, painstaking investigator but he almost certainly wouldn’t write poetry passionate enough to inspire two generations, as his gentleman-botanist grandfather had done. Alice’s sympathy and liking for him grew.
‘Yes,’ she said.
The meeting was drawing to a close. They talked for a few more minutes about the practicalities of preparation and travel, then Alice stood up and Richard walked with her to the door. They were shaking hands when he said, ‘Are you free for lunch?’
It was twenty minutes past twelve and she had arranged to meet Becky at one o’clock in a bar in Clerkenwell. ‘I’m sorry. I’m on my way to see a friend.’
He didn’t have to ask her to lunch, it wasn’t a part of the vetting process. He was asking because he wanted to. They recognised each other. She smiled at him again.
‘Of course. Well, then, good luck with your medicals and so forth. We’ll speak.’
‘Yes. Thank you for asking me to join the expedition. I’m looking forward to it.’
As their eyes met for the last time they acknowledged this for a comical understatement.
Alice sailed down in the bubble lift, crossed the grandiose foyer and walked out into the cloudy morning. There was the smell of river and the dampness of autumn in the air. The faces of people walking towards her had acquired extra definition, she could read the words on the sides of buses crawling over Blackfriars Bridge. All her senses were heightened and sharpened with the intensity of anticipation. She had been insulated by her own circumspection, but now she was going into the unknown.
Becky was waiting. Her legs were hooked round a bar stool made of tortured metal, there was a drink on the table beside her and her head was bent over the Evening Standard. Wings of smooth hair swung forward to curtain her face and then she looked up and saw Alice. ‘How did it go? No, I can see. You’re the polar queen. You’re really going? My God, Al, you are. C’mon, let’s drink to it.’
Alice laughed. She couldn’t quite catch her breath. ‘I’m going,’ she said faintly. ‘I hardly know how it’s happened, but I am.’
‘How long?’
‘Five months. The summer field season. I’ll be leaving at the end of October and I’ll be back in March.’
A drink materialised beside her. A long glass, ice, jaunty coloured straw. She took a long suck and almost choked with the intensity of the taste. Alcohol immediately fumed in her head.
Becky was wearing a khaki combat top with pockets and buttons and epaulettes, but the fabric was contradictory slippery satin. The way the light fell on it and reflected different sumptuous colours caught Alice’s eye. Pete used to talk about colour, she remembered, as if it were food or sex.
Look at this carmine, look at this crocus-yellow. Don’t you want to eat it? Don’t you want to lick it?
‘Alice? Are you okay?’
‘Yes. I’m fine. I’m just getting used to the idea.’
‘So let’s talk about it. Tell me all.’ Becky’s appetite for other people’s lives was as keen as for her own.
Alice told her about Richard Shoesmith, and the list of names, and the sharing of work, and the tasks she would have to accomplish before she could leave. All the time she was reminding herself that she was cutting loose from everything she knew and heading for a place on which she had always, from her earliest memories, deliberately turned her back.
Is this how it happens, she wondered, in other people’s lives? The moving on and the changing and the randomness that never seemed to affect her, only the people she knew? And then a series of events and coincidences link together and what was impossible at one moment becomes inevitable in the next?
‘What about the house?’ Becky was asking.
‘Oh, I’ll let it for this academic year,’ Alice improvised. ‘Maybe I’ll travel for a couple of months on the way back. It would be a shame not to, wouldn’t it? I’ve never been to South America.’
Becky was looking at her. ‘What about Pete?’
‘There’s nothing much to tell. He moved out.’
‘Is that it?’
While Margaret was still dangerously ill, Alice stayed at the house on Boar’s Hill. Pete telephoned again and again, and when she wouldn’t speak to him he turned up unannounced at her office one afternoon. She looked up from her desk to see him in the doorway – or a more than usually unshaven, crumpled, wild-haired version of him. He was carrying a bunch of florists’ roses, dark-red.
‘Pete, don’t do this.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘You won’t see me, you won’t talk to me. You won’t let me explain what happened.’
‘I don’t think what I saw needs any explaining, does it?’
He looked around, then thrust the flowers in the jug she used for watering her pot plants. He slumped down on the only spare chair and put his head in his hands. His hair stuck up in spikes, as if he had been running his fingers through it in steady desperation. Of course Pete would turn rejection in love into a piece of performance art. He wouldn’t be shaving, on principle, or eating or sleeping.
‘I can’t sleep. I’ve lost my appetite. Alice, it isn’t funny. Why are you so fucking empirical about everything? I love you and I miss you, that’s all that matters. I want you to come home.’
‘Pete. I came to your studio and found you engaged in oral sex with one of your students. The same one I saw you on the river with, and the one you were kissing at our party. On the other hand Harry saw you in a pub in Bicester, kissing someone entirely different…’
‘What? I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near bloody Bicester in ten years.’
‘…I am empirical, if you mean that I base my reaction to you on the results of observation. How else am I supposed to respond to the evidence? “Oh, look, there’s Peter with Georgia. What he’s doing actually proves how much he loves me.”’
‘I can’t bear it when you’re sarcastic. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘It doesn’t really matter any more what you can and can’t bear about me.’
‘Alice please.’ He got up again and came to her. He put his arms round her and tried to draw her against him. He cupped the back of her head in his hand and rubbed her hair. It would have been very easy, knowing and missing the warmth and the smell of him as she did, to give way and bury her face in his shoulder and pretend that she believed him. But a pretence was what it would have been, and Alice preferred meagre facts to the most colourful and persuasive elaborations on the truth.
‘I want you to move out. I am going to stay at my parents’ house until you do. You’ve got time to find somewhere else, but that’s what I want you to do.’
His face changed.
Under the veneer of his remorse there had been confidence, because he had assumed that he would be able to win her round. Realising this made her feel still more dismal. If he thought that, it was obvious that Pete had never really known her properly. They had shared a bed and made a home and a life together, and still she might as well have been a stranger, or Georgia, or the woman in the pub. It made her want to cry, but she couldn’t bear to give way to that impulse either. She looked steadily back at him, dry-eyed.
‘I see,’ he said at last.
To do him credit, he didn’t argue any more then. And he packed his belongings and moved out of the house within two days. He left a note for her on the kitchen table, weighted at one corner by the teapot still half-full of cold tea. The note said that he loved her even if he had a strange way of showing it and that as far as he was concerned this wasn’t the end of things between them. Alice crumpled the single sheet of paper into a ball and threw it into the kitchen bin.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ she told Becky.
‘I’m sorry, darling. He made you happy, you know. You were happy all this year. You laughed all the time and you didn’t take your responsibilities as seriously as you usually do. Pete made you just a little bit frivolous.’
‘I do know that.’
They had ordered some food and now it was put in front of them. Thinking she was ravenous, Alice had ordered seared tuna and glass noodles. Now she noticed that there were sesame seeds in the dressing and they looked like tiny myriapods. If she examined them more closely she imagined that she would see the filaments of their legs. Very deliberately she sliced a corner of fish, wound it in a web of noodle and placed it in her mouth. The food had a strange metallic taste.
‘Alice, are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes, of course I am.’ She smiled at Becky. ‘I’ve learned to be frivolous. I’ve got it completely sorted. I don’t need Pete and his antics. I’m just dropping everything and swanning off to Antarctica for months, aren’t I?’
‘That doesn’t sound particularly carefree and impetuous to me. It sounds very uncomfortable and rather dangerous.’
‘But I get to look at 400-million-year-old sedimentary rocks that hardly anyone’s ever seen before. I’ll wear a butch survival suit and learn how to drive a skidoo and how to rescue myself from a crevasse, and on really good days I’ll get a turn at cleaning the base kitchen. Dr Shoesmith promised me that.’ Her gaiety was convincing to herself, at least.
‘Oh, God.’ Becky grimaced.
Through the open fronts of her Christian Louboutin sandals, her toenails were clearly visible. They were painted a softly luminous shell-pink and each nail was delicately rimmed in white. Her legs were smooth and tanned, and her fingernails were manicured too. There were small diamond studs in her ears and everything about her said clean. They looked at each other and laughed.
Alice realised that she had finished her drink and had even drunk most of the melted ice.
‘Shall we have another couple of these?’
‘I’ve got to work this afternoon, unfortunately. But what the hell. I’ll have a glass of wine,’ Becky said. ‘You will come back safely from down there, won’t you?’
‘I will,’ Alice promised.
No one ever comes back unchanged, she remembered.
‘How does Jo seem?’ Becky asked.
They drank their wine and Becky finished her food. They talked about Jo and the babies and whether Vijay was exactly or only approximately the man Becky was looking for. None of this was any different from the dozen lunches that Becky and she had shared this year alone, but Alice felt as if she had moved a little distance apart. There was a voice in her ear, a waterfall of syllables. Antarctica.
From the upright chair beside her bed, Margaret saw Alice walk down the ward towards her. She didn’t want Alice to know how anxiously she had been looking out for her so she allowed herself only the quickest glance before composedly folding the newspaper in her lap. But she could see even in a second that there was more colour about her, her face had opened like a flower in the sun. The news must be good.
A flood of memories rose up and washed away the stuffy ward. Almost exactly forty years ago she had felt like Alice looked now: poised on the brink of the central years of her life with the whole breadth of Antarctica waiting for her. Even now, with pain twisting her joints so cruelly that she could hardly stand, she could remember what it was like to lie in a field tent with the wind banging and raging at the walls, or to stare down into the greedy blue throat of a crevasse where a snow bridge threatened to collapse in the late-season sun. Antarctica was a painful, perfect place. There was the astringent flavour of envy in Margaret’s mouth and she reminded herself that it was absurd to feel envy at her age. Alice would go back there instead of her. Through Alice she would live in Antarctica one more time.
‘There you are. What an age you’ve been, when I’m dying to hear all about it. Sit down. No, wait. Could you get that girl to bring us a cup of tea, d’you think?’
Alice kissed the top of Margaret’s head where the shiny pink of her scalp showed through the strands of thinning hair. ‘Do you want tea, before I tell you?’
‘Don’t be so damned annoying. Put me out of my misery.’
‘Yes. I’m going. All right?’
Margaret’s face sagged briefly with relief and the crosshatching of tiny lines deepened beneath her eyes. ‘Good,’ she said firmly and took possession of her face once more.
Alice sat down and Margaret listened intently as she described her hour with Richard Shoesmith.
‘I met his grandfather, you know,’ Margaret said.
Gregory Shoesmith had been an old man, sitting with a plaid rug over his knees and a stick leaning against his chair – just like me, now. Where do time and strength slip away to? – but he had taken her hand between his two and leaned forward so their faces almost touched. He said, ‘We have been privileged, you and I. We have seen places that we will never forget.’ He had known war and too many deaths, and he had lived a long life, but it was the ice that filled his mind. Even in old age he was a powerful man.
Alice didn’t look surprised. ‘You met everyone.’
Margaret was listening, her head nodded at every point that Alice made, but she was caught up in the teeming mass of her memories. They swirled around her, thicker and faster, like a blizzard. Alice would inherit the memories. They would be different in their precise content but they would be made of the same material. It was like handing on your own genes, mother to daughter. Antarctica was what made me, Margaret thought. It will be the making of my child too, and she needs that. Alice has always been reticent, and now she will come into bloom.
Margaret had no fears for her, any more than she had ever had for herself.
It had started to rain, and thick runnels slid down the windows. It was making her eyes swim. To clear her vision she looked down at her hands, resting on the blue cellular blanket that covered her knees. It always surprised her to realise that these veined and knotted appendages, with their swollen knuckles and brown blotches, were her own hands that had once been so strong and dexterous. The pain in her joints and in her chest sometimes seemed to belong to someone else too, to some old person who was leaning on her and whose weight she could thrust aside and step lightly away from.
Alice was talking about medical assessment.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Margaret said. Alice was so young, she moved so unthinkingly and confidently. ‘You’re just like me. As I used to be. Strong as a horse.’
‘And less skittish.’ Alice smiled. ‘Than a horse, I mean.’
Margaret was tired now. She wanted to lie down and close her eyes, and think about what she had done and what Alice would do.
Alice saw it and she stood up, pretending to look at her watch. ‘I’ll come in tomorrow.’
‘Do that. There’s a lot you’ll need to know.’
They kissed each other quickly.
‘I’m glad, Mum. I’m glad to be going.’
‘That’s good,’ Margaret answered. She was thinking, I may be old but I’m not daft. I know what it takes to do well down there and you have it, my Alice. You’re more like me than you want to admit.
Three hectic weeks had followed. Alice fitted in all the things she had to do, but only just. She went to see Dr Davey, who had been the family doctor ever since she was born.
‘You’ve never had a day’s illness in your life, my dear. I don’t need to run a battery of expensive tests to know you are in perfect health.’
He ticked a long list of questions, scribbled a paragraph at the end and signed the medical declaration. Alice countersigned it and sent it off to Beverley Winston.
She visited her dentist and had all her fillings checked. She went up to London and at a Sullavan-owned warehouse near the North Circular Road she was issued with her polar kit by a man with a heavy cold, who told her that he had spent six winter seasons down on the ice. There was a bewildering pile of fleece and Gore-tex inner and outer garments, all marked with the EU flag and Sullavanco logo, just as Richard had described. The massive red outer jacket, with matching windpants, had a big white rectangle on the back with the words ‘1st EU Antarctic Expedition’ stitched on it. On the front there was a Velcro sticker that read simply ‘Peel’. There was a pair of boots with insulated liners. And there was a balaclava helmet that covered her head except for a narrow eye slit. It was hot in the warehouse, and just trying all these items on made sweat run down and pool in the small of her back.
‘Good lug,’ the man with the cold said as she tottered away with her new wardrobe.
She went up to Cambridge for a three-day induction course run by the British Antarctic Survey for their own departing personnel, where she was the object of curiosity and envy.
‘I hear you people have got unlimited funding,’ a sandyhaired climatologist remarked enviously. ‘While we have to sign for every specimen bag and camp meal.’
A man wearing a jacket and tie laughed over his pint of beer. ‘Sullavan will need to spend a few of his millions putting Kandahar straight. How long is it since we pulled out of there?’
‘He wouldn’t even notice it, whatever it costs him. There’ll be en suite bathrooms and waiter service. Bit different from what we can expect, eh, Jack?’
The BAS men roared with laughter and Alice smiled politely.
They all went to lectures about the dangers of frostbite, and glacier travel, and ecological disposal of waste matter. There were practical sessions about mountaineering and survival. Trevor had taught Alice the basics of rock climbing on their Alpine holidays together. The instructor didn’t patronise her quite so much when he realised that she knew how to put on a climbing harness and could tie a figure of eight knot in a rope.
The preparations absorbed her attention on one level; on another she observed her own dashings around as if she had become a stranger. Even her body felt slightly unfamiliar. She had lost her appetite, and if she sat down to collect her thoughts between work and meetings and lists she found herself on the brink of falling asleep. This she put down to being too busy, to delayed anxiety about Margaret and perhaps a reaction to Peter’s absence. He often slipped into her thoughts, but she wouldn’t see him and she didn’t even know where he was living.
The last week came. The plane tickets for her complicated journey south were sent down from the Polar Office and she propped the folder on the small mantelpiece in her bedroom. She packed and repacked her books and clothes in the big orange kitbags supplied for the purpose. The house was tidy and empty – everything she didn’t need for Antarctica had been put into store, and the tenants would move in the day after her departure. It was odd to look from the bare rooms to the October sky beyond the windows, and to think of being away for a whole winter. When she came back the trees would be putting out new leaves. She watched the dazed new students flooding the streets and reflected that they would be confident old hands by the time she returned.
Two days before she left, Jo and Becky gave a goodbye party for her at Jo’s house.
‘Are you sure you can manage it?’ Alice asked her in concern.
‘It’s getting much better. Charlie only woke up once and Leo twice last night. There were two whole hours when all three of us were asleep.’
It was a good party, but different.
Alice wore the long johns and balaclava and huge insulated boots, until she got too hot in the crush and discarded them behind Jo’s sofa. She was pulling a fleece vest over her head and briefly revealing her black lace best bra, which had shrunk in the wash and exposed an unusual depth of cleavage, when she looked up and saw Pete. His eyes travelled over her. He had shaved and, apart from a mournful expression, looked just as he always did.
‘Did Jo…?’ Alice began, thinking that she would have preferred to know that he was coming.
He shook his head. ‘Nope. I wasn’t invited, but I came anyway and Harry didn’t turn me away from the door. You look wonderful. You must be excited.’
‘Oh, Pete.’
He held out his arms and she hesitated, then let them enclose her.
‘Dance?’ he asked.
She nodded and they swung across Harry’s sanded and sealed floorboards. They had always moved well together, she thought.
At the end of the evening, when most of the guests had hugged Alice and said goodbye and told her that she must take care to come home safely, Pete was still there. He hadn’t drunk very much, he had talked to everyone and bursts of laughter continually erupted around him. When he wanted to he could always make himself the centre of a gathering. Even though she hadn’t intended it, Alice kept track of where he was in the room and listened for his voice through the hubbub of music. The past had been swallowed up, the future was unreadable, and the present was nothing but this instant’s narrowest margin between sense and desire. She had the feeling that her good sense, always her strongest asset, was inexplicably deserting her.
It was time to go home. Alice had an armful of goodluck presents, several of which were toy polar bears even though the nearest real polar bears to Antarctica lived in the Arctic.
Becky kissed her, cupping her face briefly in both hands. ‘Come back soon, Ice Queen, d’you hear?’
Now that the moment was here, it seemed like for ever in prospect. Alice smiled as confidently as she could. ‘It’s six months or seven months at the very most. I’ll be back before you’ve even noticed I’ve gone away.’
Jo and Harry stood in the hallway with light spilling out into the darkness beyond the porch. Their house was full of the warmth and laughter of the evening. Alice felt that she was moving out of the web of friendship and familiarity.
Jo kissed her too.
‘Have a wonderful, thrilling time.’ She was envious, Alice could hear it. Jo would like to be going but she was tied to this house by her babies and Harry. Would I change places? she wondered. Yes, she thought, with the sad picture in her head of her own house empty but for the last boxes stacked in the hallway, and yet with Pete at her shoulder as if nothing had ever gone wrong.
And then, No, I would not.
‘Good luck, Al.’ Jo and Becky and Harry and Vijay gathered in the doorway to wave goodbye. Alice looked back at the tableau they made and framed it in her mind.
‘I’ll see you home,’ Pete murmured.
‘Pete’s going to see me home,’ she called and they all nodded, waving and understanding perfectly.
They went in Alice’s car, with Alice driving, but he did jump out at the other end to open the car door for her. He followed her up the familiar path, took her key out of her hand and unlocked the front door as well. They half turned to each other, hesitating, then Pete tipped her face up to his. ‘I wish you’d let me say I’m sorry.’
‘You can say it.’ Her voice was raw in her throat.
‘I wish you’d let me show you I’m sorry.’
Alice lifted her hand. It started as a warding-off gesture but her fingers seemed to melt. They rippled over the vee of her top which felt too tight, as if it only just contained her breasts, and fluttered over her belly. Her skin seemed to have developed a million new nerve endings.
Why not? she thought.
Why not just once more, after so many other times?
‘To say goodbye?’ she murmured.
There was a flash of triumph in his eyes, quickly extinguished. But you are wrong, the triumph’s really mine, she thought.
‘If that’s what you truly want to say,’ he answered.
He followed her into the house and closed the door behind them.
The shelves in the bedroom, the top of the chest of drawers, the bedside tables were all bare. Alice’s kitbags with the flag and logo stood packed against one wall.
Pete slid his hands over her, cupping her breasts, drawing her hips against him. ‘You’re different. You’re lovelier,’ he breathed.
Am I? I am not sure that I even recognise myself, she thought.
But her body remembered the familiar rhythms well enough and improved on them. Their lovemaking had always been affectionate, well-practised, almost invariably satisfactory, but tonight it went much further than that. In the absence of intimacy and trust, they were naked and greedy.
Afterwards, Pete lay with his head against her heart, listening to its beat. Her hand lightly cupped the curve of his skull. She could feel his limbs growing heavy as he drifted towards sleep.
I have just taken what I wanted, she thought, without weighing up whether it would hurt him or not.
The notion of revenge had never crossed her mind and this didn’t feel like it, but there was a symmetry here.
Alice closed her eyes and thought of the long journey ahead and the ice waiting for her at the end of it.
In the morning Pete sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and watching her as she made toast from the end of a loaf. She emptied the crumbs out of the bread bin and wiped the inside with a wadded paper towel. She would spend tonight, her last in Oxford, at Boar’s Hill with Margaret and Trevor.
‘Have you finished with your plate?’
He looked at her and she steadily returned his gaze.
‘Are you going so far away because of me?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘No, Pete. I’m going because of me. And partly because of Margaret.’
Peter sighed. He stood up and looked around the kitchen. ‘I made a good job of those shelves.’
They had come in a flat pack from Ikea. He had assembled them and fixed them to the wall.
Alice suddenly laughed. She felt the upward swing of happiness. Everything was going to be all right. ‘You did,’ she said softly.
‘I’d better get to the studio, I suppose. I’m still working on Desiderata
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