Sun at Midnight (28 page)

‘Lewis,’ she said quietly. He was motionless, his face grey with shock.

She snapped the carabiner into the loop of rope and moved carefully over the snow to kneel in front of him. She pressed the gate of the carabiner open to remind him how it worked.

‘Lewis, I want you fasten this into the loop of your harness. Can you do that for me?’

Slowly he reached out his mittened hand and took it from her. The rope snaked over the innocent snow with its telltale pucker. His arm was trembling, but it moved obediently. His face screwed up in an agony of concentration, then he dared to glance down as he groped at the unfamiliar configuration of his safety harness. Alice edged forward to look too. The crevasse was narrow and Lewis was wedged into the vee shape. On either side of him blue ice dropped away into seeming infinity. There was a metallic snap. She peered down and saw that he had clipped the carabiner. She had him on the rope now.

‘Well done.’ Alice smiled to reassure him, although she
could hardly breathe. She stepped back to where her axe was buried in the snow and put her boot firmly on the head. She gathered the rope in her mittened hands and braced herself.

‘Now. I’m going to haul on this end. Can you pull on that end and try to scramble out?’

He bit his lips, then nodded and clamped his mittens on the rope.

Alice put her back into it. He wriggled, trying to kick his legs free. She pulled, but it was like dragging a dead weight. Lewis worked one elbow deep into the snow and hauled on the rope with the other hand. He rocked his hips and an inch of his chest emerged, then another. The rope bit into Alice’s palms and she looped it round her wrists for extra traction. In a rush, Lewis’s torso emerged from the mouth of the crevasse. He got one knee up over the lip, scrabbled wildly, and the other followed. He fell forward on all fours, his head hanging, his breath coming in rough gasps.

Alice gave him a few seconds’ respite, then put her hands under his arms to help him to his feet. ‘Let’s move away from the edge.’

She unhitched the rope from her ice axe and led him away to the safety of the rock outcrop. He sat down on a flat-topped stone and rested his head in his hands. Alice found the Thermos of hot coffee in her pack, poured a cup and gave it to him. Then she took the radio out of her pocket to call up Phil and Rooker. Her hands were shaking and the sweat of fear prickled under her arms and in her hair.

‘Wait,’ Lewis ordered. She sat obediently, watching him sipping his coffee and looking away from her down the slope of the glacier. The cobalt glint of the sea was visible in the distance.

‘You did well,’ he said after a moment.

‘Not really. Phil would have said it was unorthodox. And I shouldn’t have let you wander off in the first place.’

Amusement struck cold sparks of light in Lewis’s eyes. He was recovering himself. ‘Do you think you could have stopped me?’

It was an academic question, Alice thought. ‘Are you hurt anywhere?’

‘No. I’m not hurt.’ He went on, ‘It was my fault. I’m sorry. Thank you for keeping your head. I won’t forget what you did, but I’d much prefer it now if we continue as if nothing has happened.’

Alice could perfectly well understand why. It was a matter of dignity. ‘Of course. Would you like me to call up and say we’re ready to head back to the base? Or shall we do some more geology?’

Lewis smiled. When he chose to use it, he had considerable charm. ‘We could just sit here in the sun and talk for half an hour?’

‘Of course,’ Alice said again. She poured more coffee into his cup and put a pack of biscuits on the rock beside him. He seemed to have recovered with remarkable speed, but at some level he must still be shocked. It was hard to judge how old he was. Somewhere in the early sixties, she guessed. An unroped fall into a crevasse would scare anyone, whatever their age.

‘Don’t get cold,’ she advised.

He pulled the flaps of his fleece hat down over his ears and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and nursing the heat of the coffee. ‘You are like your mother,’ he said.

‘Not very, unfortunately.’

‘I don’t know about that. You look like she did, in the old days. And seeing you working with that rope, every fibre of your being concentrated on it, made me think of her.
Margaret is the most single-minded woman I have ever known.’

‘Yes.’

‘I loved her, you know,’ he said.

There was no wind. Alice hadn’t misheard. She stared at him as he lifted the tin cup to his mouth. The faint chink of metal against his teeth told her that his hand was still shaking.

‘You didn’t know.’ It wasn’t a question. Reaction was loosening his tongue. A fleeting glance into the face of death had opened a door in him.

‘She was fifteen years older than me, but I had never met anyone like her.’

‘Were you lovers?’

There was a pause. ‘Yes,’ he said.

It was Alice’s turn to stare away down the glacier. ‘Perhaps I don’t want to hear this.’

‘It only lasted one summer. There was no question that she didn’t love your father and you. She was loyal, where it mattered, I always knew that. She was making her second television series. I was just a beginner in the business and Margaret was like an electric wire. She lit everything up and she had the gift of making everyone she came into contact with shine more brightly as well.’

Alice remembered her on the stage at school, how she had looked more vivid than the teachers. The moment when she realised that her mother was sexy. ‘I see,’ she said quietly, wondering whether she really did.

There was an explanation now for Trevor’s reticence. Perhaps less of a one for his unbroken devotion.

‘Were you the only one?’ she asked, already knowing the answer.

‘I have no idea. I only know that I have never forgotten her. And we have stayed friends over the years.’

Alice wasn’t all that surprised, now that this little mineral nugget of the truth glinted at her. Maybe at some level of consciousness she had guessed long ago that her mother had had lovers. It was something to do with the tilt of her head, the way she crossed her ankles, the outlandish details of her clothes and shoes. Her long absences from home. She always looked for and accepted male attention as nothing less than her due. Perhaps, Alice thought suddenly, she hadn’t particularly liked Peter because he didn’t play the game of flirting with her.

‘I see,’ she said again. She didn’t like to think of the pain that Trevor must have suffered. Sometimes their summer holidays in the mountains had a melancholy edge that she had been too young to understand. Yet Margaret had always come home to him in the end and there was no doubt that the two of them were happy now. They were as inextricably entwined as ancient tree roots.

There are many different ways to make a marriage work, Alice reflected. Almost as many as there are marriages.

Lewis had drunk his hot coffee and eaten two biscuits. Warmth and sugar worked to restore his equilibrium. He brushed a fine spray of ice crystals from the shoulder of his parka. ‘It’s a long time ago. I was a hungry young man in those days.’

‘A bit of a maverick?’ She said it without thinking but he nodded, not at all displeased. He was as vain as powerful men always are.

‘Yes.’ He chuckled. ‘Like your friend Rooker.’ He remembered the conversation of the night before. His memory was faultless; he would pride himself on that.

‘My friend?’ she repeated.

‘What do you think of him?’ It was an apparently casual question, but to Alice all the turns of this conversation were outlandish. It was strange enough just to find herself perched
on a rock talking to a tycoon who had yesterday been no more than a name in the newspapers and a logo on her parka. Today she had put him at risk of his life and learned that the tycoon was her mother’s long-ago lover. Antarctica had this effect. It distorted and diminished what was familiar, and at the same time it threw the unfamiliar into such close and enlarged focus that it obliterated everything you thought you knew.

Rooker, he was asking about Rooker.

What she actually thought was that there was something about him that required everyone else to take up a position. It was either
your friend Rooker
, or
thank you for being my ally
– and therefore by definite implication not Rooker’s. And yet Rook himself was utterly absent from all these transactions. He gave no sign of even being aware of them.

She said precisely, ‘I think he’s dangerous.’

Lewis laughed. He was delighted with this. ‘Most interesting men are dangerous. And every interesting woman, take my word for it.’

Alice was chilled. The sky was still bright, but they had been sitting and the sweat from her exertions with the rope was cold on her back. She tried to hide a shiver but Lewis noticed it.

‘I think I shouldn’t have blurted out about Margaret and me,’ he said.

‘I understand,’ she told him. And now Margaret Mather House stood here on the windswept peninsula as a footnote to history. She took the radio out again and called up Phil.

‘Be with you in five,’ he chirped. She stood up, a little stiffly, and coiled and stowed the rope. She buckled the axe to her rucksack, and she and Lewis were standing watching as the two skidoos rounded the corner of the slope and raced up the glacier towards them.

At the last moment Lewis held out his hand. Alice gave
him her left because she was holding her rucksack in the other and they shook awkwardly.

‘Everything okay here?’ Phil asked as he dismounted.

‘Fine. Very interesting,’ Lewis smoothly answered.

Alice climbed on behind Rooker. She sat well back, holding on to the seat strap for balance as they bounced away again.

The base was quiet. On a fine day with Lewis Sullavan in their midst, the scientists except for Richard were out in the field. The media crew were on the beach, filming three Weddell seals sunbathing on an ice floe.

‘Now then, what’s next?’ Lewis asked.

Richard had scheduled a visit to one of Laure’s penguin colonies further down the coast. Rooker was standing by with the Zodiac.

Lewis rubbed his hands together. ‘What are we waiting for?’

Alice watched him go. She could see now that his shoulders were slightly bowed. He was tired and still feeling the grim mouth of the crevasse clamping round his hips. But he would keep going, because that was what you did. Tomorrow the helicopter would come and fly him on to the next set of decisions and another cohort of minions. She didn’t envy him.

Inside the hut the harsh midsummer sunshine made the room look smeared and dusty, in spite of all Russell’s efforts at cleaning it up. There were too many people for the cramped space. Flakes of paint shaken from the wooden walls speckled the floor like dandruff, and the visitors didn’t take off their boots at the door so there was sand and melting snow everywhere. Russell himself emerged from the storeroom with a sack of flour in his arms. There was another gargantuan meal to prepare.

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Alice said and he gratefully patted her on the shoulder.

Rooker drove the prow of the Zodiac hard at the shingled beach and Richard leaped out to make it fast. There were so many penguins here that the dinghy’s arrival made almost no impression on the hordes of birds streaming up and down the beach. The new arrivals flipped out of the water and marched determinedly uphill to their nests. They were fat with fish and their white breasts were clean. Those coming in the opposite direction were leaner and their fronts were smeared with dirty pinkish guano. They looked like little old men after a heavy night on the town. They made miniature detours round the boots of the invaders, but they were so intent on the business of getting food that they paid no further attention. The chirring sound of 100,000 birds was loud enough to drown out the regular slap and scrape of waves breaking on the shingle.

The red blobs up amongst the rocks rising from the steep snow above the beach were Laure and Jochen, working. There were a dozen murky reddish ribbons connecting the rocks to the water, each of them dotted with bobbing black and white heads. These were penguin motorways, linking the nest sites to the sea and food.

As always, Rooker felt delight at the sight of so much intense and single-minded activity. He stepped into the water in his waders to moor the dinghy and a breaking wave erupted around his calves with hundreds more black torpedo bodies. They pitched forward on to the glittering shingle and instantly began the waddle uphill. At the nest, their hungry mates were sitting on a pair of eggs. Rook knew from Laure that soon, around the New Year, the chicks would hatch.

He saw that Richard was helping Lewis Sullavan ashore. The woman assistant, Beverley whatshername, was next. She was unused to boats and stood up too quickly, then almost fell over as a wave slopped against the dinghy. Rooker
leaned in and steadied her, then put his arms under hers and lifted her on to the shore.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured. He could feel the way she was loose against him.

The media crew scrambled in their wake, passing the camera from hand to hand.

When everyone was safely on the beach Richard said over his shoulder, ‘Wait here for us, Rook.’

It wasn’t what Shoesmith said so much as the tone of his voice that made Rooker’s fists clench.

It was like being eleven years old again.

Uncle Henry Jerrold on the stone steps of the house with blunt-faced stone lions guarding the door, soaked grey light and a ragged grey sky trailing rain. ‘Wait here, James.’

So he did, with his coat dripping and his suitcase at his feet.

After she died, there was really nowhere for Jimmy to go except back to England.

There was an orphanage in Dunedin; he had spent the first three months there while his care worker sorted matters out ‘with your folks back home’, as he put it. Shane was all right, Jimmy thought, insofar as anyone or anything was all right in those blank, whirling days. But Shane’s job was only to make short-term arrangements for children like Jimmy Rooker. It wasn’t as though he could go and live with him or anything like that, or even be friends, really.