Sun at Midnight (20 page)

‘Time for some food?’ she asked.

‘I’d say so.’

In her tent – the one in which the kitchen had been established – Alice lit the Primus. She filled a pan with snow and sat back on her heels. The tent’s interior glowed a soft yellow and the Primus’s roar and its kerosene scent took her back to holidays in the mountains with Trevor.

‘Hello, Dad,’ she said softly. ‘Here I am.’

Richard and she would take turns at being cook for the day. Most of their meals, two-man portions packed in a box for each day, were freeze-dried but for tonight Russ had sent out chicken portions and prepared vegetables in Ziplock bags.

When the snow-water came to the boil, Alice made mugs of tea, then threw handfuls of rice into the remainder. Tonight there would be fried chicken and vegetable rice.

At 10 p.m. Richard finished the prearranged radio schedule with Niki and presented himself at Alice’s tent door.

‘Dinner is served.’ She grinned up at him.

They talked about the rock sections they would make and measure tomorrow. Richard reclined against her mattress. His aquiline, handsome face was masked by a thickening beard and the yellow light of the tent blotted out the anxiety lines etched between his eyebrows. Alice was sharply aware of the tiny compass of their camp and the hostile miles that cut them off from Kandahar. Richard and she might have been the only people in the world. The training that she had done at Cambridge and with Phil seemed suddenly inadequate to equip her for survival in this harsh, isolated place.
Kandahar
now represents civilisation and safety, she thought, with a tremor of amusement.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she said, as Richard licked his tin plate clean and peered into the saucepan to see if there might be a spoonful of leftovers. There were apples and chocolate for pudding, and Alice passed his share across to him. He polished his apple on his fleece leggings as he waited for her question.

She hesitated, wanting to admit to some of her anxiety without sounding too vulnerable. ‘Why haven’t we got a field assistant out here with us? Phil, or Rooker? Isn’t that more usual? I suppose I’m worried that I won’t be able to do everything I’m expected to, because it’s my first time.’

She added this in case he might think that she was being critical.

Richard weighed his apple in his hand. ‘It’s a fair question,’ he said after a moment. She broke her chocolate into
squares, lined them up and put the first one into her mouth. Thick sweetness melted on her tongue.

‘It’s easier to provision a two-man camp. There’s less kit and food to transport. It also means we’re not taking out a man who would be just as useful, probably more useful, back on the base. But you are right.’ He sighed, then flicked her a glance as if he was wondering whether or not to level with her. ‘Those aren’t the real reasons. The truth is that I prefer it like this. Without extraneous people. You and I know what needs to be done and we can do it. It’s simpler. It’s peaceful. Isn’t it?’

And it was. Out here, even the wind seemed less an aggressor and more a fourth dimension of the landscape itself.

Alice saw, suddenly, how much Richard longed for peace.

The demands of being expedition leader and the expectations of Lewis Sullavan were weighing more heavily on him than she had guessed. What Richard really wanted was to immerse himself in science, to be left alone with his fossils, and yet some contrary impulse had driven him to take over the leadership role. A sense of obligation to family expectations and history, she thought.
Just like me
.

Richard wasn’t good at defusing the prickles of tension back at Kandahar. He was awkward about giving orders. He couldn’t deal with Rooker’s overt aggression or unspoken scorn, and all his speeches about community and teamwork left his little group separately bemused rather than united. Alice knew all this, because she felt a version of it herself. Science was seductive because of its orderliness, its silent pathways through the maze along which you followed the patient thread of conjecture. You didn’t have to go out and sell yourself in order to sell other things, as Becky did, or even blunder through the minefield of motherhood, as Jo was learning to do. You collected rocks or fossils and took
them back to the laboratory for analysis, and your web of data thickened into knowledge and thence understanding of the world’s dynamic process.

The light in the tent was fading, and the wind banged and rattled at its thin skin. Another pot of snow was melting on the Primus for hot drinks.

‘I understand,’ Alice said quietly.

He nodded, leaning back against her bedding with his chin sunk on his chest. Suddenly, she was reminded of a photograph she had seen reproduced in half a dozen books of polar history. It showed the interior of Scott’s hut at Cape Evans with Scott himself presiding at the head of the mess table. It was Christmas on the ice and halfway down the row of bearded faces was Gregory Shoesmith’s. Richard bore a marked physical resemblance, tonight, to his famous grandfather. And Alice could sense how deeply, for the whole of his life, Richard had wanted to be like him as well as look like him.

‘I’ll be field assistant. I think I can just about remember what Phil taught me.’

Richard sat up, visibly struggling out of his melancholy. ‘You’re far too good a geologist for that. I need your expert sedimentologist’s eye. But don’t worry, we’ll be quite safe, the two of us.’

Alice tried not to acknowledge even to her inner self that she was not reassured. She dismissed with equal speed the thought that if Phil or even Rooker had said the same thing it would have been quite different. Instead, she looked at Richard’s attractive but closed-in English face. His cheeks above the margins of his beard were reddened by the wind and his lips were slightly chapped. She realised that she wanted to put her hand to his cheek. She didn’t even know if he was married, she remembered.

She cleared her throat and he watched her as she leaned
forward to burrow amongst the food boxes. ‘Would you like coffee? Or herbal tea?’

When she had made the drinks, Richard thanked her gravely for a delicious dinner, just as if they were in Sussex or Gloucestershire. But then he added, ‘And for your understanding. Goodnight, Alice.’

She curled up in her sleeping bag, drinking tea and thinking. They had a week’s work to do out here, the two of them. That was the thing to focus on, not a momentary desire to touch someone because of the furrow between his eyebrows and the anxiety in his heart.

As soon as she put her empty cup aside and closed her eyes, Antarctic sleep came to claim her, as thick and soft and featureless as a blanket of fresh snow.

The days in field camp at Wheeler’s Bluff quickly fell into a rhythm.

They were very busy but they were also peaceful, as Richard had predicted.

The weather was good. The wind dropped to a gentle southerly breeze and the sun shone. The temperature rose above freezing in the middle of the day and it was surprisingly pleasant to be outside, moving about in the shelter of the rock ridge.

Alice was caught up in her close-quarters study of the rocks that were held in a matrix of finer-grained silts and muds. Veins of quartz flowed around her, and rivers of boulders and pebbles. Her head was full of her work and the hours flew as she measured and drew in her notebook. She loved the sense that she was deciphering a single page in the earth’s history book. Wheeler’s Bluff was interesting to them both because the rocks encompassed the transition between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, and the sedimentary layers were particularly rich in molluscan fossils.
Richard had studied the extinction of mollusc species in other parts of the world, and he intended to establish the dates of extinction here and relate them to his earlier studies.

He worked with quiet absorption, moving up and down the rock band, tapping with his geological hammer to extract another promising specimen. The metallic ringing sound carried a long way in the silence. Whenever Alice looked up, to rest or just to enjoy the sun on her head and the breeze on her face, she would see him with his head down, intently scribbling in his notebook or blowing the rock dust off a sample with a sharp puff of breath. When he removed a specimen he took a GPS reading to establish its exact location and sealed it in a marked sample bag.

His industry spurred her on. She clambered over the outcrops, running her hands over the chunks and blocks of rock, chipping at shards with her hammer and picking with her fingertips at the remains of flora and fauna that had been embedded there for millions of years. She chose places where she could climb easily to make her painstaking measurements of the thick sections and she wedged herself into cracks and perched on ledges to draw detailed stratigraphical sections in her notebook. She collected thin sections from the crucial boundary margin, and labelled her samples with the index of the profile and an individual sample number. Back on the base she would analyse the rock fragments for mineral composition, then make a more precise analysis with all the facilities of her lab in Oxford.

When one or the other of them judged that the day was half over they would scramble down from where they had been working to the skidoo parked at the base of the rock band. They didn’t usually travel more than ten or fifteen minutes from the camp, but their time and the fuel seemed too precious to waste in going back there in the middle of the day. They brought a rudimentary picnic instead, and the
first one to down tools laid out the food on the seat of the skidoo and opened the flask of hot coffee. It was a good time to sit and look at the view.

On some days the ice sheet was a diamond-hard expanse of silver and blue, on others billows of snow swelled up in the wind and swept towards them, hiding the sun or dimming it to a disc of dull tin. They talked quietly about the location of the next section, the identification of Richard’s molluscs, their intentions for the following day. Once they had devoured everything they went straight back to work for another four or five hours. The outline of the days was featureless, but they were crowded with incident.

One afternoon they scaled the rock face to reach the top of the Bluff. They put on climbing harnesses and roped up, and Richard led up a hundred feet of puckered and weathered rock. Alice followed, carefully placing her hands and feet, half intrigued by the rock’s composition and half terrified by the height and her exposure. As she scrambled over the top, Richard gave her his hand and pulled her up.

She was elated, and breathing hard with relief.

‘Well done.’ He smiled, with his face close to hers. ‘And just look.’

She turned and gasped. The puckered and pleated whiteness stretched away into infinity, textured with every shadow of blue and grey. Far in the distance, like mountains glimpsed in a dream, she thought she could see immense sharp silver peaks fretting the sky. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen and the most desolate. Every day Antarctica seemed to offer a fresh set of superlatives and a continual reminder of how far she had travelled from the ordinary world. Out here, on the ridged back of a mountain that was like a monster rising out of a frozen sea, it was as if she and Richard Shoesmith were the only two people in the universe.

That night, Richard heated up freeze-dried beef and dumplings while Alice made the nightly radio connection with Kandahar. She gave the weather report to Niki, temperature and wind speed and direction and cloud cover, and noted the forecast.

‘And what’s going on back there?’ she asked at the end, and through the static heard his fat chuckle that always sounded at odds with his skeletal physique.

‘So. You are missing civilisation, I think? Or missing me, maybe?’

‘Of course I miss you, Nik. I miss everyone.’

Niki told her that Valentin had been out on the glacier with his drilling equipment, taking core samples of the ice, and Phil had been assisting him. Arturo was busy with his wind profiling and Laure, with Jochen’s assistance, had netted and microchipped almost a hundred penguins.

‘And Rook is building a beautiful hut for the skidoos. So you see, life on base is much as it always is.’

‘Good. Roger, Niki. Same schedule tomorrow.’

‘Goodnight, Wheeler’s Bluff. Over and out.’

In fact, Alice thought, she wasn’t missing life on base at all. She had never felt as alive and yet as peaceful as she did out here. Field life was just as simple and satisfying as Richard had predicted. There was work, there was food, there was sleep and there was human company. The two of them fitted together neatly and unquestioningly, linked by their work and the pared-down rituals of the day. She forgot that she had ever felt afraid of being out here.

From the other tent, where Richard was dishing up the evening meal, came the sound of a spoon banging a tin plate. Alice zipped up Richard’s tent against the wind and scuttled the four steps to her own.

They had fallen into the habit, after they had eaten, of talking for an hour before bed. When the sun dipped behind
the Bluff it grew dim in the tent, so Alice lit her tilley lamp and stood it on the pot box. She thought of how their tiny camp must look from across the great distances of the ice sheet: two fragile golden triangles glowing in the pearly emptiness.

She was talking about her father. He was often in her mind out here.

‘I remember his work,’ Richard said, although Trevor’s field of structural geology had relatively little bearing on palaeontology. She was pleased with this, that it should be Trevor’s achievements that were noted, for once, rather than Margaret’s.

She told him, ‘We used to go to Zermatt every summer, just the two of us. My mother would be on lecture tours, or making a film, or catching up on her students’ work. Trevor would collect rocks and show me granite and dolerite and quartz and felspar. Once he scraped a rock chip on the metal shaft of his hammer and it made a chalky mark. “That shows us it is calcareous,” he said. I can hear him saying it. He taught me to rock-climb too.’ She laughed. ‘Although you wouldn’t think it.’

‘You did well today,’ he said and meant it.