Sun at Midnight (35 page)

‘You may be right,’ Alice agreed.

‘I am right. And in a place like this our ordinary leader’s longing to be extraordinary makes him dangerous.’

A small icy fingertip, colder than the wind that worried at the tent, touched the nape of Alice’s neck. ‘He’s not a fool,’ she said sharply.

‘Oh, no. It would be much simpler if he were. The trouble is that he knows exactly what he is and how far he’s got to go to be anything else.’

She drank her tea, registering the strong whisky taste with deliberate attention. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say.

Rooker was bored with Shoesmith as a topic of conversation. ‘And what are
you
afraid of, Alice?’

He was taunting her, she thought. She considered the question seriously, because a straight answer wouldn’t be
what he was expecting. ‘I used to be afraid of disappointing my mother. Rather similar to Richard, you see, which may be why I feel more forgiving of him than you do. I was so afraid that I deliberately withdrew from her and turned my back on what she valued so that there would be a lesser risk of exposure. But coming down here has changed that. For me and for her, it was the right thing to do.’

Her eyes met Rooker’s now and she found that she was smiling. Her ears and neck were suddenly warm inside the fleece hood.

‘I see,’ he said.

‘And you?’ she countered.

He gave the same derisive laugh. ‘Nothing. Nothing’s important enough.’

She waited, but he didn’t elaborate. ‘Go on?’

His eyes moved over her face. The image of hands cupped round a match flame came back into Alice’s mind. Even Rooker, out here in the wilderness where the winds tumbled down from the plateau, might feel the need for intimacy. But he only raised one eyebrow and yawned. The conversation was finished and the shutters came down over his face.

‘What time tomorrow, did he say?’

‘Half seven.’

‘Well, then, time to sleep. Are you warm enough in here?’

What would you do about it if I said no?
Alice smiled again. ‘It’s not too bad.’

‘Sweet dreams,’ Rook said.

In the morning’s radio link Russell reported that Jochen was worse. The doctor’s self-diagnosis was appendicitis.

Richard pinched the bridge of his nose. Alice and Rooker looked at each other and listened in silence.

‘You’d better advise Santa Ana,’ Richard responded.

‘Niki called in this a.m. The helo is standing by but the
forecast’s for winds gusting up to fifty knots.’

‘Thank you, Kandahar. Keep me posted.’

After he had signed off Richard turned on them. ‘Come on. Let’s get moving.’ His mouth looked pinched.

It was a long, bleak day. A capricious wind stirred up twisters of snow that enveloped and momentarily blinded them. Alice worked doggedly in Richard’s wake, examining and chipping at the sedimentary layers and logging the sections whenever the visibility improved enough to allow her to do so. The sight of Rook’s bear-like bulk trudging ahead of her was the counterbalance to Richard’s increasingly frenzied darting.

They reached camp again only just in time for the evening’s radio link. ‘Kandahar, do you read me? Over,’ Richard shouted into the transceiver.

‘Wheeler’s Bluff, Wheeler’s Bluff, this is Kandahar,’ Niki’s voice patiently responded.

The news was that the helicopter had managed a landing in a window of calmer weather at 4.30 p.m. and had immediately flown Jochen back up to Santa Ana where a fixed-wing flight would take him onwards to Punta Arenas, to hospital and a probable appendectomy.

‘Right, Kandahar,’ Richard answered. ‘Thank you for that.’

‘Now we have no doctor on the base,’ he muttered once he had signed off.

‘But Jochen will be all right,’ Rooker observed.

Richard brushed the concern aside. ‘Yes, yes. I’m sure. The problem I’m facing now is whether to bring down another medic for the last month of the season. It’s a very costly option. I’ll have to consult the Polar Office. I wonder if Niki can patch me through to London from out here?’

This turned out not to be possible. Richard had to decide between heading back early to Kandahar, where most of his
team were caught without medical cover and with only one safety officer, or staying on at the Bluff to pursue his fossils.

‘If we can only uncover one or two more Gastropoda. Just one specimen would do,’ he kept repeating to Alice. Rooker silently prepared the food for the evening meal. Alice tried to persuade Richard that Russell could deal with the Polar Office in London.

‘Maybe, but I should be at Kandahar to talk it over with them. I’m the only one who can make the decision.’

It was true that Richard didn’t know how to delegate. Rooker was stooping over the frying pan with his back turned but Alice knew that his eyebrows would be drawn up into sarcastic peaks.

‘What’s the forecast?’ Rook drawled.

Richard had written it down, but had been too preoccupied to take it in. He looked at the left-hand page of the camp log where the twice-daily forecasts were recorded – ‘2 February. Wheeler’s Bluff: cloud cover variable, winds strengthening, twenty to thirty knots.’

It was not much of a variation on the preceding days, slightly better if anything.

Rook shrugged and tipped hot rice into the three tin plates. The rising steam was instantly damped by the tent’s clammy cold air. They ate the food without interest, hunger and tiredness fighting their usual battle.

Alice suggested, ‘Let’s do another day’s work, wait for Niki to give us the response from the Polar Office tomorrow evening, then decide. There’s nothing to be done now, it’s midnight in London.’

Richard nodded, repeating the plan as if he had come up with it himself. ‘And that means a prompt start in the morning, please.’ He spoke brusquely to Rooker, as if he had been late every morning of the trip.

‘Aye aye, sir.’ Rook lifted one hand to his temple in a lazy salute.

Richard frowned but he let it pass. Five minutes later, after repeating that another Gastropoda find was all that really mattered, he said goodnight and withdrew to the other tent.

‘It’s only an ancient bloody dead snail,’ Rooker sighed.

Alice was tired. She wanted to complete the fieldwork, but the thought of a hot shower followed by a warm bed at Kandahar was deeply alluring. She was pricked by anxiety to think that there was no doctor on hand, even if that doctor was Jochen, but on the other hand the speed with which he had been evacuated was reassuring. ‘No. To him, it’s much more than that. But you’re not a scientist.’

Rook only laughed. ‘That’s for sure.’

The next evening Niki passed on a message from Beverley Winston. Lewis was in Ecuador and could not immediately be contacted.

‘Meanwhile we sit here on the ice and wait for a word,’ Richard fumed.

‘You wanted extra time to pick around the rocks,’ Rooker pointed out.

It was, in any case, only another four days before they were scheduled to return.

The forecast was more or less unchanged but they woke up to a viciously howling wind and a blinding wall of blown snow. From the mouth of Alice’s tent the other tent was barely visible and the snow igloo that sheltered the latrine barrel was completely obscured.

‘No leaving camp today,’ Rooker announced.

Richard put his dish of porridge aside, having barely touched it. ‘We’ll give it an hour, then see.’

‘No,’ Rook said.

They waited in Alice’s tent. Rooker and Alice tried to
read but Richard rocked up and down, opening the flaps to look outside and constantly checking his watch. After two hours he said, ‘Right. It’s clearing. Let’s move.’

‘It isn’t doing anything of the kind. I’m safety officer here. No one leaves camp.’

‘We’re going to work. It’s six hundred yards to the nearest section of the Bluff. We’ll head there.’

‘No.’

‘Alice?’

After nine days of avoiding eye contact, Richard looked straight into her eyes.
Choose
, he silently challenged her.

She crawled to the tent door and stared out. It did seem that the wind was relenting. Through the whirl of driven snow she could just make out the outline of the igloo, ten yards away. Richard was asking for her loyalty. Rooker was stubborn. This confrontation was about their mutual detertation as much as it was about work or safety. Alice didn’t want to be a pawn in their play. She would make her own decision.

She did think that the weather was improving and almost anything would be better than a whole day confined to the tents in this atmosphere of rancid dislike. She picked up her parka from her pile of damp, filthy belongings and began to pull it on.

Rooker’s hand shot out and clamped round her wrist. His grip was like a steel band and it hurt when she tried to shake it off. ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot.’

‘Let go, Rook. I’m going to work.’

He glared at her, then gave a sharp hiss of exasperation. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve got less sense than I gave you credit for.’

He let go and turned away, and she was surprised by how uncomfortable it felt to have disappointed him.

‘I’m not coming with you. I’ll stay here with the radio.’ He tossed a hand-held radio to each of them. ‘Call in every
thirty minutes without fail. If I don’t hear from you twice in every hour I’ll know you’re dead, and I’ll pack up and get back to base.’

‘I will make a note in the log of your refusal to accompany us,’ Richard said.

‘For Chrissake, Shoesmith, this isn’t 1913. Write whatever you like in your fucking logbook. I’d do it before heading out into that blizzard, though, because you might not get the chance to do it later.’

To Alice, as they were ready to leave, he murmured, ‘You really don’t have to go.’

‘I know I don’t have to. I’m making a choice.’ She hastily pulled on her fleece hood as she spoke, and he untwisted it for her so that the face opening fitted snugly over her eyes and nose.

She crawled in Richard’s wake out into the snow.

It was like her first day in Antarctica all over again. Snow worked its way behind her goggles and into her hood, and for a few seconds she was sure that the air was too thick with it and too cold to breathe, and she would suffocate. She half walked and half stumbled into the whiteness, her stinging eyes glued to Richard’s back. Don’t stop moving. Don’t lose sight of him.

As soon as they were underway she knew that it had been a mistake to leave camp.

The skidoo seemed to be suspended in a dense white vacuum in which up and down were meaningless. She knew that they must be moving forward because the engine was engaged and the tracks were turning, but there was no way to tell. There was no view ahead, no landmark to steer by, only blankness. It was utterly disorientating. Richard was navigating by compass bearing. They were crossing the glacier towards the Bluff, moving parallel to the crevasses that had become familiar in the last few days, but ahead and to
the side there was only the unbroken wall of blowing snow. She gave up the attempt to see what was coming and ducked her head instead. At any moment they might plunge sickeningly into a cleft in the ice. She had seen it happen to Lewis on a clear sunny day. She tried to hold herself in readiness for the jolt and then the terrible drop.

Instead, the skidoo engine stopped and the wind hit her full on again as Richard climbed off. Ahead, so close that the invisible crest threatened to topple on them, the black contours of the Bluff were just visible through the blizzard clouds. Without waiting to take stock, Richard was immediately plodding across to the rock. With his hood up and his head bent he looked like a robot. Alice battled grimly in his wake.

They attempted to work, although it was clear from the outset that there was almost no point. The wind was so strong that it tore the pages of their notebooks and threatened to snatch instruments out of their hands. It was impossible to talk, only to shriek above the gusts, and it was too cold to take off mittens or goggles for even a few seconds at a time. Richard pressed himself against the snow-plastered rocks and began sweeping them bare with his parka sleeve. As soon as a patch of fossil-bearing rock was exposed the snow obliterated it again, but he pressed closer still, trying to shelter the section with his body. He chipped at the rock with his hammer. There was no hope of labelling a sample bag, even of holding on to it for long enough to seal up the specimen. He dropped the chunks of rock loose into the pocket of his parka.

Alice watched in dismay, anxiety swelling in her chest.

After thirty minutes she was frozen. Her cheeks had lost all feeling and the skin of her lips was welded to the ice building up in the layers of fleece and Gore-tex covering her mouth. Her hands and feet were numb. With infinite difficulty
she extracted the radio from her inner pocket and tried to huddle in on herself to call Rooker. Her lips tore painfully as she tried to speak.

‘I read you. Over.’ His voice was steady.

‘We’re trying to work. Visibility nil, conditions deteriorating. Over.’

‘Are you coming in?’

‘I’ll try to make him.’

She tottered the few steps to Richard and thumped him on the back. He half turned, startled and then impatient. Alice waved her arms, signalling
enough
and
let’s go back
. Sharply he shook his head, then held his splayed hands up at her to signal
ten more minutes
. She knew what he was thinking. Against all the odds, these might be the crucial minutes. This minute, or the next one, he might make the great find.

She hunkered in beside him, counting the time away. Once, she looked back over her shoulder. The skidoo was gone, or rather it had turned into a rough snowy hump indistinguishable from a dozen other lumps of rock.

He had had long enough now. She grabbed his shoulder, pulling him away from the rock face. Okay, he signalled. Wait. Alice knew that she was beginning to panic. She slowed her breathing and made herself watch as he took out the compass to get the reverse bearing for their journey back to the camp. His head bent and his shoulders hunched while the wind assaulted him. Then he dropped the compass.

In an eye-blink the instrument hit the ground beside his boot, hung for a second in the ruff of soft snow mounded around his tracks, then toppled again and began to slide. It gathered speed, skidding faster, out of sight down the small slope to the glacier. They were so cold that they hardly moved. There was no point in plunging after it. It was gone for good.