Sun at Midnight (52 page)

‘There must be something.’

‘I am sorry. He say that he will send address when he fixes up somewhere.’

Alice understood that this woman, whoever she was, would very much like there to have been more. She was obviously telling the truth and Rooker had left without giving any indication of where he was going, yet she didn’t want to hang up and sever even this tenuous connection. She was thinking that she didn’t have so much as a snapshot of him. The fire had consumed her exposed film, her diary, the Christmas wood carving, every scrap of physical evidence that he had ever existed. She had a brief horrible feeling that it was licking at her memories too, torching the margins with a ribbon of blue flame that would burn faster until even these shrivelled and she would be left with nothing at all.

She gave her name and her telephone number to the Argentinian woman, biting her lip and waiting while she shuffled away in search of a pencil and paper, and then asking her to read back what she had written down. She tried to picture the woman’s face – a landlady? A friend? More or less than that? – and her surroundings, but the fog of language and distance got in the way, and she could see nothing.

When she had to hang up she felt as if a lifeline had snapped.

From upstairs, as she tended to Meg for the rest of the day, she heard the phone continually ringing. Margaret and Trevor fielded the calls, not even bothering to relay messages up the stairs to her because they could hear her footsteps as she walked up and down with the baby in her arms to soothe her crying, or because she was feeding her, or changing her, or just in case they had both fallen into a doze.

I’ll get a routine organised, Alice thought, remembering that Jo had somehow managed all this with
two
of them. She found herself shaking her head in empathetic astonishment.

So far, the evenings had seemed to be Meg’s quietest time. Alice carried her downstairs in the Moses basket and put her in the corner of the dining room. A one-bar electric fire burned with a dry glow, taking the chill off the air within three feet of it. There were flowers everywhere, stripped of their cellophane sheaths and wedged at random into whatever receptacle would hold water. Margaret ran her finger down a list of telephone messages while Trevor served up portions of grey-knobbed cauliflower cheese, the sauce torched to black blisters over the uplands of the dish.

‘Good nourishing cheese and fresh vegetable for you,’ Margaret helpfully elaborated. ‘Now then. Jo called twice, Becky called once. They’re going to come and see you tomorrow. Er, let’s see, Peter rang yet again. And Dr Davey’s going to drop in; he says he and the practice nurse will be here in the morning to look at you and Meg. One of your colleagues from Kandahar rang.’ Alice’s head jerked up. ‘A Frenchwoman. I wrote down her name and number, here it is. Laure Heber. I haven’t bothered listing the journalists. I put most of the flowers in water, there are a couple of those
basket arrangements in the kitchen. You won’t be wanting them in your room, will you?’ She paused to eat a forkful of cauliflower before adding, ‘You could do with a secretary. Oh, and there was a call from Lewis Sullavan. I think you were sleeping.’

Alice put down her knife and fork. ‘What did he say?’

‘Best wishes and so on. Sorry not to have spoken in person yet. Hopes to be able to see you before too long.’

‘To see me?’

Lewis had instinctively liked Rooker, he had recognised him in the way that she had recognised Richard Shoesmith. Surely Lewis would help her to find him?

‘Where was he calling from?’ He had been in Toronto earlier, but that didn’t mean he mightn’t be in Los Angeles or London by now.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask,’ Margaret answered.

Alice glanced at her father. Silvery fronds of fine hair rose vertically from his pink scalp. With his napkin tucked into his shirtfront he was eating his dinner with apparent appetite, unconcerned at the mention of Sullavan’s name.

This is what time and age do, she thought. Passion and pain are both dulled, then they fade away altogether and leave acceptance in their place. Habit and familiarity knot round each other like the dry balled roots of an ancient tree. The contrasting urgency of her need for Rooker, the whitehot importance of finding him before too many precious days could trickle away, made her shift and double up in her chair as if she were in pain.

Margaret stared at her over the top of her glasses. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Alice made herself answer.

Trevor was watching her now too, but he didn’t say anything.

A small experimental cry rose from the Moses basket. I
am home, Alice was thinking. But I don’t belong here any longer. Everything has shifted and I don’t recognise the perspectives. Her parents were two tired old people, rattling around in a dilapidated house that was too big for their needs. There were too many books, the layers of dust were steadily thickening, there were memories and regrets blown into all the corners like drifts of fine sand.

‘Finish your food, before you pick her up,’ Margaret advised. ‘Babies have to learn who’s boss.’

‘I think things are done differently nowadays,’ Alice replied.

Jo and Becky arrived in the middle of the following morning. Alice got as far as the front step to greet them as they whirled at her. They enveloped her in hugs and questions and exclamations, and as they swept into the house she laughed wildly with the joy of being with her friends again. ‘I missed you,’ she gasped. ‘I
really
missed you.’

‘Where is she? Let’s have a look at her.’

Up in Alice’s bedroom where they had confided about boys, and chopped each other’s hair, and shared their first spliff one evening when Margaret was away, they leaned over the Moses basket.

‘Pete!’ they exclaimed in unison.

Alice pressed her head between them. ‘I don’t think she looks like anyone, just herself.’

Becky gripped Alice’s wrists, held her at arm’s length and studied her face. ‘You look tired, but more or less all right. How do you feel? And why didn’t you tell anyone about all this, not even Jo and me?’

‘Yes, why didn’t you?’ Jo demanded. ‘We’re your friends, aren’t we?’

‘You are. I didn’t know, I didn’t realise until weeks after I got there. And then it…seemed both too late and too
soon to leave, and so I decided just to stay and to deal with everything to do with being pregnant once I got back home. I thought there was plenty of time. It sounds strange now, but can you understand how I felt?’

Jo shook her head, Becky nodded.

‘How are the twins?’

‘They’re with Harry. They’re almost walking. Don’t try to change the subject, I still think you could have told us. I didn’t even realise why you were e-mailing me with questions about babies.’

‘It wouldn’t have been fair to tell you, for one thing.’

As she explained that once she had made the decision to stay on the ice it had seemed essential to take the entire responsibility herself, Alice had the strange sensation that there were two separate worlds spinning around her, both containing parallel places that she and Meg could occupy. There was Oxford; that took in the Department of Geology and her students, her house once she had retrieved it from the tenants, Jo and Becky and her parents, Pete, all their friends and the rhythms of a life that had once seemed to offer everything she wanted. And there was another world, a much hollower and emptier place where the wind blew and the horizons were cracked with ice, but it was where Rooker was.

The two places would never merge.

She could choose one or the other, but not both.

Jo and Becky were both staring at her.

‘Ali?’

She blinked, realising that she had stopped talking. ‘Sorry. I can’t seem to make my brain work properly.’

Jo took her by the arm and steered her to the bed. They sat down, Alice propping herself against the wooden headboard and Jo perching on the end as they had often done before. But now the Moses basket lay between them. Becky
leaned against the chest of drawers, listening, a frown line showing between her groomed eyebrows.

Jo said, ‘I know how you feel. Just a few days ago you owned yourself and your body, and you slept when you were tired and talked joined-up sense to other sensible people, and you imagined that when the baby came life might be disrupted a bit but it wouldn’t change completely. And now it’s as if your entire existence has been whisked away. You can’t finish a sentence, you can’t even get dressed in the mornings. You’re exhausted and bewildered, and in your case you haven’t even got Pete around. That’s not to say he wouldn’t be with you if he could, by the way. He’s been on the phone non-stop to Harry and me. “I’m the father, I ought to be there.” Et cetera. Listen. It may feel like it, but it’s not going to be this way for ever. Remember what I was like? And now’ – she shrugged, then smiled – ‘I can get out of the house on my own for two whole hours at a time. Look, Beck and I bought you some things.’

In the carrier bags that Becky had brought upstairs there were candy-striped Babygros and tiny pink socks and a hat like a strawberry, and a white toy polar bear.

Alice had tears in her eyes as she unwrapped them. ‘Polar bears live in the Arctic,’ she sniffed.

‘Don’t be so bloody pedantic. And Al, you know what? It’s okay to have a good cry if you want to.’

Noisy, racking sobs suddenly burst out of her.

Her friends exchanged anxious glances. Jo held Alice’s shoulders and Becky put a clump of tissues into her hand.

‘It’s all right,’ Jo soothed, but tears ran down Alice’s chin and she gasped and hiccuped with grief, shaking her head because she couldn’t get out the words to say that it wasn’t all right at all. Meg snuffled and began to howl too.

Jo turned aside and scooped up the baby. She nestled her
against her shoulder and rubbed the tiny bent back, murmuring, ‘There, little girl. Hush now.’

Becky kneeled and gripped Alice’s hands. ‘Tell us what’s wrong,’ she murmured.

Looking down through the blur of tears Alice saw the pastel flowers on the duvet cover and the little pile of baby clothes, and bright frills of tissue paper and ribbon, and all the dense furnishings and memories accumulated in her room. She remembered the searing brilliance of the flowers in the clinic, and how Santiago had seemed so hot and crowded and complicated, and the noise and hectic speed of the flight from Santa Ana, and the close air of the medical room on the
Polar Star
, and all the way back to the utterly contrasting unlimited whiteness of the ice.

She couldn’t speak. Jo rocked Meg to soothe her and Becky massaged Alice’s hands while she cried and cried.

Kandahar had been a life stripped bare, reduced to a matter of survival that was too stark and too engrossing to require any embellishment or decoration. The grandeur of Antarctica didn’t account for detail, or call for any refinement. Rook was part of that; that was what he was for her. He was elemental and essential. It didn’t matter what he did or had done, or what he looked like or how he spoke. The only thing that mattered was where he was now, because she was beginning to believe that she couldn’t live without him.

Gregory Shoesmith’s famous poem came into her head, ‘Remember This, When I Am Best Forgotten’. She had known it by heart, but exhaustion and the confusion of hormones had broken the lines into elusive fragments. How did it go?…
no human ornament, only the day’s luminous aisles, night’s rafters…

The white pillars and flutings, and the massive blackness of the endless polar night were so vivid in her mind that the
absence at the centre, of Rooker himself, was almost unbearable.

At last, the sobs came with less violence. Alice gasped for breath and lifted her head. She held the wadded tissues to her swollen eyes and looked away from the colours lapping over her bed. Then she took Meg gently out of Jo’s arms and held her against her heart.

Jo stood up. ‘Pete’s said he’s sorry. You think he doesn’t mean it but he does. Let him take care of you both. You can move back into the house together, make it home again, be a proper family.’

Becky shook her head at her, but Alice knew that Jo was offering her her own version of happiness. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘So who is he?’ Becky asked.

Becky had understood what Jo had missed.

There was a small, weighted silence.

Then Alice said, ‘Rooker.’

It made her happy and at the same time it pierced her heart just to speak his name. There was a pause while the other two placed him amongst the jumble of names and anecdotes that Alice had included in her e-mails, and in the garbled press reports of the birth and rescue.

‘The pilot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who took you out in the helicopter? Delivered Meg on the way?’

‘Yes.’

Jo whistled. ‘That’s quite a story. You fell in love with him.’

In spite of everything Alice smiled. Her nose was streaming and her eyes stung. ‘It’s not a story. It’s the truest thing I’ve ever known. I fell in love with him without realising it and then there was a fire and everything suddenly got very
dangerous and difficult, and I understood that he is the most important person in the world for me. Then Meg started to come and he did everything he could. Somehow he saved us.’

‘Does he love you?’ It was Becky who asked this. The frown line creasing her forehead was easing.

‘He did then.’

‘Where is he now?’

Alice’s eyes met hers. ‘I don’t know. He seems to have disappeared. And I don’t know how to find him.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

There was an ache and an emptiness in Alice’s voice that discouraged any more questions for the time being. Meg was whimpering and nuzzling. Alice sat down and undid her shirt, and as the three women sat and looked at each other there were the small ticking sounds as the baby latched on.

‘Antarctic Drama Mum,’ Jo said in a bemused voice.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ Alice dismissed Lewis’s PR machine as she concentrated on feeding.

‘You are famous today.’ Becky nudged the heap of newsprint with her toe.