Sun at Midnight (39 page)

She held his gaze. ‘It’s an accident of the weather. You’re not Captain Scott or Ernest Shackleton, or Mawson or Amundsen. You’re not your grandfather, but that’s because you don’t have to be, not because you haven’t got it in you. The pioneer days have long gone. We’re just a party of scientists, with our bags of rock and tubes of penguins’ blood, holed up in our lab on what was the seashore and is now
ice. We could go home in two days’ time, and do our analyses and write up our results. The business of science will either be infinitessimally advanced or it won’t, but we’ll have done all that anyone expects of us. Who’s expecting so much anyway? Lewis?’

Richard slowly shook his head, staring at her as if he barely understood what she was saying. ‘Who? Ourselves, of course. Oneself. Are you afraid of staying here, Alice?’

‘No.’

It was a lie. As she stood there her stomach jutted out like the prow of a ship. In the corner of her mind she knew that she must be further along than she had calculated. She must have already been pregnant when she had spent her last night in Oxford with Pete. How many months? Two? Three, even?

She was thinking that she didn’t care about duty or honour or science. She cared about life.

The life she was carrying inside her. She was afraid to put it in further jeopardy. ‘I would like to leave on the Ukrainian ship.’

He brushed the words aside. ‘We will all leave together as planned on the
Polar Star
. We’ll negotiate the ice by skidoo or be lifted out by helicopter, which contingency we have planned and paid for. It’s a matter of routine.’ He smiled at her without humour.

Niki carefully took off his headset and placed it on the hook above the bench.

Alice nodded. ‘I see.’ She hauled her parka round her shoulders and walked the bitterly cold steps back to the hut. The room was littered but empty. The only sound was the wind and in the distance, like a heartbeat, the steady pulse of the generator.

In the morning Rooker insisted that everyone convene round the mess table.

A low sun, tangerine-coloured, glowed through the snowcrusted windows and revealed indoor air thick with bluish smoke coils from the breakfast frying and Niki’s cigarettes. There was a smell of old food and dirty clothes. Richard sat silently in his usual place at the head of the table, his hands pressed close together.

‘You all know what this is about,’ Rook said calmly. ‘We can leave here on the Ukrainian ship. I think we should take a show of hands.’

A pulse twitched at the corner of Richard’s mouth. ‘I am the leader of this expedition,’ he said again. There was a crack in his voice and his knuckles were as white as bone. Alice felt so much sympathy that she could hardly look at him.

Rook ignored him. ‘Round the table, then. Russ?’

‘Stay till
Polar Star
comes.’ The base manager’s dry Kiwi voice was unemphatic. Russell’s loyalty to the expedition leader was unshaken.

‘Arturo?’

‘I am able to wind up my studies in time, I see no point in maybe spending a whole winter here. I go with Ukrainians.’

‘Laure?’

Laure looked exhausted and faintly tearful. ‘Me also.’

‘Niki?’

‘Ukrainians.’

‘Four of us in favour so far, so…’

‘Just wait a minute, mate.’ It was Phil who interrupted him. There was no sign of his usual chirpy grin. ‘It’s eighteen days to finish the job, right? I don’t like pulling out early. I’m for staying put until the fifteenth.’

‘That’s the considered view of our safety officer?’ Rooker’s voice grated with sarcasm.

‘Yeah, it is. Who are you to appoint yourself vote taker, anyway?’

Hostility reared between them and seeped round the rest of the table. Everyone was fidgeting now, not looking at anyone else.

‘Valentin?’

‘I stay. Same reasons as Phil. I think there is no need to hurry away.’

Four all. It was Alice’s turn and there was an uncomfortable silence.

‘I vote to go out on the Ukrainian ship,’ she said clearly.

Rooker leaned back in his chair. ‘That’s a majority,’ he said to Richard.

It was as if there were only the two of them in the room.

Very slowly, Richard got to his feet. He stood behind his chair, gripping the back. ‘I remain the leader of this expedition and what I say goes. Lewis Sullavan has provided the funding, I control our budget.
Polar Star
is paid for, an entirely unnecessary Ukrainian evacuation is not. I remind you also that this is a team. We stay here as a group, regardless of your divisive
voting
, Rooker, until the agreed date for our departure.’

There was a stubbornness in him that Alice couldn’t help but admire even now. But she was summoning up all her courage to tell them the truth, to blurt out why the Ukrainian ship would have to come. It shamed her to think that she hadn’t even considered the cost implication.

Before she could open her mouth Rook sprang up and leaped across the room. They all saw what a big, coiled, dark, dangerous man he was. His hands went to Richard’s throat and he shook him as if he were a child’s doll. Russell and Valentin ran at him and tried to haul him off while Phil wrestled an outraged Arturo. Niki’s fists swung. Suddenly there was a mêlée of men and overturning chairs. Alice and Laure stared at each other. This was what all their highminded European collaboration and teamwork had come to – a brawl over the breakfast table.

The fight was over as quickly as it had begun. Rooker wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, with Russell and Valentin hanging on to his arms.

Richard spoke out of pinched lips. ‘You’re relieved of your duties, Rooker.’

Rooker laughed. He seemed genuinely amused.

Looking from one face to another, Alice found that her confession had died in her mouth. She couldn’t –
could not
– pipe up now and tell them that she was pregnant and needed to go home. That would be to place her concerns in direct opposition to Richard’s. That would oblige him to choose publicly between her requirements and his own overwhelming need.

She would rather almost anything than have to witness his choice.

No. She would have to stay put and pray that her luck would hold. Maybe Phil and Russ and the others would be proved right after all, and they would steam away north on
Polar Star
.

Richard stalked out of the hut. In silence, the rest of them turned away from each other.

There was a wary stillness on the base for the two days until the Vernadsky ship left. Mealtimes were silent, outdoor work was done as the weather permitted. Niki reported eventually that the Ukrainians had closed their station for the season and were aboard ship en route for Ushuaia.

Richard acknowledged the information with a mechanical nod. The rest of them looked at each other, mutely reflecting on the extra degree of their isolation. They depended now on the possible arrival of their own ship, ice permitting, or on the air support of the Chileans at Santa Ana.

‘Antarctic heroes, eh?’ Phil tried to rouse them, but no one responded.

As soon as the Ukrainian ship was gone the weather deteriorated. There was still daylight because the sun climbed above the horizon for a few hours each day, but the sky was either dark with cloud or obscured by blizzards. The snow was so thick that there might just as well have been no light, because there was no visibility. Alice completely understood the old description of a serious blizzard as ‘white darkness’.

The frozen bay lost its crests of ice and became a pearly blank plain with no beginning or end. Only the shawled berg stood out, intermittently visible during the ragged gaps in the weather as a reminder of the landscape’s vanished scale. The penguins deserted the Kandahar rocks and began their exodus towards the distant sea margin. Without the little birds’ constant bustle, or the glimpses of seals basking on the ice or whales blowing in the deeper water, the sense of isolation deepened further. The wildlife and the sun were retreating, leaving the human interlopers to the mercy of winter.

The baby moved around much less now. The walls of her womb were tightening around it, restricting its blind ballet. When Laure was out of the bunk room, Alice slid her hands over the mound of her stomach, feeling the pressure of a tiny heel or fist answering her touch.

Are you there? Can you hear me, baby?

She tried to make the monologue soothing and reassuring.

We’re going to be fine, you and me. Wait and see. Wait quietly there until we’re home.

Once, Laure opened the bunk-room door, startling her. Alice hunched her back and pulled more clothes round her body.

‘What were you saying?’ Laure asked, eyeing her doubtfully.

‘Nothing,’ Alice answered. She realised that she had been talking out loud. Now her room-mate thought that she
rambled on to herself. It didn’t matter. They were all retreating into eccentricity in their different ways, as the light dwindled. As the food supplies began to run low, meals became fragmentary, eaten at different times, and they passed by each other silently in the narrow confines of the hut.

One night, Alice was reading in her bunk by the light of her head torch. The little beam concentrated on the page gave her the illusion of cosiness, as if she were curled up with a book in her childhood bedroom at Boar’s Hill. Then an awareness that something was not quite as usual intruded into her consciousness. She lay still for a moment, trying to fix on what it might be before she lifted her head off the pillow. When she did so, an icy draught of air bit at her bed-warmed neck. She could feel it on her face now, too. The room was unusually cold. She sat up and the torchlight showed her Laure rolled up and fast asleep in the opposite bunk. Laure slept more and more these days, retreating for twelve and fourteen hours at a time.

Alice pulled the covers up round her shoulders and tried to concentrate on her book again, but it was no use. She was shivering now. She swung her legs out of bed and padded in her thick socks to touch the electric wall heater. The panels were cold, with only a faint suggestion of warmth lingering in the lowest rib. She clicked on the main light switch, intending to check the controls in case the heater had been turned off by mistake. Nothing happened. She listened and realised that it was the absence of the generator’s constant low murmur that had first caught her attention. There was no electrical power because the generator was off.

Quickly, she dragged on some more layers of clothes. She opened the bunk-room door and closed it behind her with a soft click.

Someone was moving around in the hut. The walls were flickering with a soft, unfamiliar light.

‘Hello?’ Alice said. She twisted the casing of her torch to widen the beam.

There were lit candles all around the room, on the shelves and windowsills, on the computer table and even on the monitor. Some of the candles tipped at an angle, already drooling wax.

A dark figure turned and his huge shadow reared up the wall. She knew who it was.

‘Richard?’

Instinctively she switched off her torch so as not to dazzle him, then wished that she had not. Candlelight threw his features into exaggerated relief. His beard was black and she couldn’t see his eyes, only the dark sockets.

‘Richard, what are you doing?’

It was one o’clock in the morning. Everyone else on the base must be asleep.

‘We have to economise on fuel, you know.’

On the table was a big box, a gross of candles. He took another and clicked Niki’s cigarette lighter to it. A little teardrop of flame flared and steadied. Richard cupped a hand round it. His face was all raw bones and black hollows. The hair prickled at the nape of Alice’s neck.

‘Why is the generator not running?’

‘I told you.’ He was tetchy, not wanting to be distracted from his task. He put the new candle on a shelf close to the picture of Lewis Sullavan that Phil had pocked with darts.

Alice heard another footstep behind her and whirled round. She almost collided with Valentin.

‘Val,’ she breathed in relief. ‘The generator.’

He dodged round her. He was frowning. ‘It has broken down? We must fix. The freezer will be off. I have to preserve my ice core samples.’ Valentin’s first thought was for his glaciology study. The freezer in Margaret Mather House was full of the neat sections he had drilled out of the heart
of the glacier. Alice remembered that Laure’s penguin blood samples were stored there too.

‘I switched off the generator to save fuel,’ Richard murmured abstractedly. The lighter clicked again as he lit another candle.

The other men had woken up now and they came out of the bunk rooms. Their shadows swept over the walls as the candle flames shivered. The room was crowded with giant spectres.

Somebody shouted, ‘Shoesmith, what in Christ’s name d’you think you’re doing?’ Rooker was large, angry and reassuringly three-dimensional. He was already scrambling into his boots and weatherproofs. He and Phil headed outside, followed by Valentin. The blast of cold air made them all shiver.

Russell tried unthinkingly to switch on the electric kettle, then filled a pan with water and lit the gas under it instead. Niki thumbed a cigarette from his pack and took the lighter out of Richard’s hand. Arturo held Richard by the arm and guided him to a chair. He gave no sign of a protest. He put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands.

No one looked at anyone else. Seconds crumbled away, the silence only broken by the wind and the hissing gas. After a few minutes they heard a stuttering roar that settled into a steady chugging as the generator fired up again. The lights blinked on and the candle flames paled. Alice went quietly round the room and blew them out one by one. The puddles of hot wax hardened instantly in the freezing air.

Richard lifted his head. ‘I do apologise,’ he said quietly. ‘That was an overreaction. But it is important, you know, if we can’t leave here. We must conserve fuel. An airdrop might not be possible for weeks.’

Alice stood at the end of the table and gazed at the dense blackness framed by the window. Blood pulsed noisily in
her head and her scalp tightened as the realisation finally and properly dawned on her.