Sun at Midnight (9 page)

The applause at the end was loud. Mr Gregory came back up on to the stage and thanked Dr Mather for coming to talk to the school. Margaret stood beside him, even in her heels barely reaching up to his shoulder. She looked straight out into the audience and she appeared to be made of different materials and coloured more brightly than the biology teacher or the headmistress who was beaming on her other side. Alice realised now that that was the moment when she understood how sexy her mother was. Margaret was then in her fifties.

Margaret had another lecture to give after her talk to the school and she drove herself away straight afterwards in her green Alfa Romeo with the dented rear wing. Alice was surrounded by a group of girls.

‘Your mum’s rather amazing,’ Becky Gifford said. Becky’s own mother was a television actress, and Becky was the most sophisticated and confident girl in Alice’s year. She had never noticed Alice before.

‘She is a scientist,’ Alice answered, wanting to make clear that that was what was most important.

‘So are you going to be one as well?’

‘Yes,’ Alice told her.

It was probably true, Alice thought, that she owed her friendship with Becky to Margaret and that day.

A nurse came and stood in front of their chairs. ‘You can
come and sit with her now,’ she told them. ‘Could you pop these on first? They do up at the back.’ She handed them a blue paper gown apiece. In silence, Alice and Trevor helped each other into the crackling shrouds and did up the ribbon ties at the nape of the neck.

Margaret had been moved to a different cubicle, a glassedin alcove to the side of the department. Beyond the glass partition three other trolley beds had also been drawn up. She was propped up on pillows with a clear plastic mask held to her face by an elastic loop. The mask looked too big for her, as if it might envelop the bones of her jaw and cheek. An intravenous tube was taped to her arm. Her eyes, wide with alarm, fixed on them as they approached.

‘Here we are,’ Trevor said. They moved one to either side of her. The bed immediately beyond the glass was occupied by a young Asian man, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed. ‘Here we are now,’ Trevor repeated.

Alice glanced around and saw a chair across the corridor. She carried it over and placed it for Trevor to sit down. He folded abruptly into it as if his legs were about to give way. He leaned to put his hand on Margaret’s arm and she turned her head to see him better.

After a while she drifted into sleep.

The time passed, minutes divided from minutes by the slow sweep of the second hand of the wall clock directly in Alice’s sightline. She brought her father a bottle of water from a vending machine, but he wouldn’t leave his place for long enough to eat anything.

A nurse came every half-hour to check Margaret’s pulse and temperature. The close-quarters bustle and clattering of the emergency department seemed to reach them through thick layers of close air. The young Asian man was wheeled away by a porter in green overalls and his place was immediately taken by an older man who looked around him in
mournful bewilderment. The evening seeped away. Alice thought of the chains of car headlights outside on the bypass and of busy people on their way to somewhere familiar, at the end of an ordinary day.

A different nurse performed the observations, which meant that the night staff had now come on. Alice was just deciding she would insist that Trevor ate some food when Margaret opened her eyes. They focused, in an instant of confusion, then flooded with mute terror. Her free hand came up and clawed at the mask. She dragged it off her face and hoarsely whispered, ‘I’ll suffocate.’ Her Yorkshire vowels were exaggerated:
soooffocaaate
.

Alice jerked to her feet. ‘No, no, you won’t. It’s helping you to breathe,’ she soothed.

‘Mag? Maggie, darling, you’re all right,’ Trevor murmured.

Her silvery-haloed head rolled on the pillow.

‘Are you there?’ Margaret demanded.

‘Yes,’ they said. Her head turned to Trevor and then the other way, until her eyes connected with Alice’s. Alice had never seen her mother afraid before, but her face was livid with it now. There were beads of sweat on her forehead. She breathed noisily with her mouth open and Alice tried to put the mask back, but Margaret impatiently knocked it away.

‘I want you to do something for me.’ She said it to Alice. Even now she managed a degree of imperiousness but it sounded a cracked note, the tremulous insistence of a frightened child.

‘Of course I will.’

‘I want…’ Margaret took a breath. ‘I want you to go south. To Lewis Sullavan’s station.’

‘I can’t go anywhere, not when you are ill.’

Margaret’s hand twitched on the covers. ‘This isn’t it. Not by a long chalk it isn’t. I’ll be getting over this. But I want
you to go, while you can, while you’ve got the chance. For…me. Do it for me.’

Alice understood what she meant, with the clear precision born in the most intense moment of an intense drama. She knew that she would remember this instant and her exact comprehension of her mother’s wishes. There would be no denying or forgetting what was intended.

Margaret was looking at the spectre of her own mortality. She wouldn’t die here, not yet, her will was too strong for that. But she knew, finally and empirically, that her strength was not infinite. And her intention was that her life would be carried forward for her, out on the ice where she had lived it most intensely, by her only child.

Somewhere beyond their glass box a telephone was insistently ringing. Footsteps passed, metal harshly scraped – the sounds they had been hearing for hours. Alice looked at Trevor and saw the mute imprecation in his face. Trevor had never, throughout her life, demanded a single thing of her. All he had done was to love the two of them, his two women. The telephone stopped ringing, then started up again.

‘Of course I’ll go,’ Alice said softly.

The fear in Margaret’s eyes faded, replaced for a moment by a clear sapphire glimmer of triumph. It was Trevor who smudged away tears with the back of his hand.

‘You’ll find details. E-mail, in my e-mail in-box,’ Margaret said.

‘Don’t worry about that now.’

Gently Trevor lifted the plastic mask and fitted it over his wife’s mouth. She nodded her acquiescence and her eyes closed again.

At 10 p.m., when Trevor began to doze with his head on the covers next to Margaret’s hand, a different doctor came to explain regretfully that there would be no place available on the ward before the morning. Margaret herself was now
asleep, so Alice drove her father home to Boar’s Hill. She heated up some soup and once they had eaten and she was sure that he had gone to bed, she made up a bed for herself in her old room. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up, as she had done as a child, and looked across at the old books on the white-painted shelves. There was Shackleton’s
South
, and Fuchs and Hillary’s
The Crossing of Antarctica
, both of them presents, on different birthdays, from Margaret. She had written Alice’s name and the date on the flyleaf of each. It was as if Alice could see straight through the stiff board covers now, into an Antarctic landscape where the reality of Margaret’s films and the explorers’ stories overlapped with a fantastical realm of ice turrets and rippled snow deserts and blue-lipped crevasses. Tattered veils of snow were chased by the wind and the howling of it rose inside her head, reaching a crescendo in an unearthly shriek that drowned out her mother’s voice and the chirring of the penguins.

And now Antarctica lay in wait for her, with its frozen jaws gaping wide open.

Alice sat upright. Sleep was out of the question. She pulled on her clothes again, shivering in the unheated bedroom, and went downstairs. Margaret’s chair at the gate-legged table in the bay window overlooked a dark void where the garden lay. Alice made herself a mug of tea and sat down at her mother’s computer screen.

Do it, she exhorted herself. You made a promise. Do this much at least, before tomorrow throws any complications in the way.

Alice clicked
new message
and began to type.

If it was appropriate, and if her understanding of the present situation was correct, following her mother’s serious illness she would be honoured to be considered in her place for
membership of the forthcoming European joint expedition to Antarctica.

She attached a list of her scientific qualifications. At the end, against Previous Antarctic Experience, she typed
none
.

The tea had gone cold but she took a gulp of it anyway. She reread her short message and changed a couple of words, then checked that the address in the box was correct. She typed her own correspondence address and quickly pressed
send
. The out-box was briefly highlighted before the communication went to an unknown recipient named Beverley Winston, assistant to Lewis Sullavan.

There was nothing else to be done tonight. Alice poured her unfinished tea down the kitchen sink and went back to bed. She lay still under the familiar weight of the covers. She thought of her own bed in the house in Jericho and wondered where Pete was tonight. Only a little time ago they had woken up in the same bed with nothing more than a kiss glimpsed at a party to separate them.

Now there was the prospect of half a world.

The acceleration of change seemed to open a pit beneath her. Opening her eyes again to counter another bout of nausea, Alice examined the contours of her room. She had lived a remarkably sheltered life. As she saw it now, she had made an almost stately progression from childhood to today. In Margaret’s shadow and under her father’s benign protection she had done what was expected of her and what she expected of herself. No more, nothing more than just what was expected.

And now, without Pete and with her mother’s shadow shortened, there was
this
.

Suddenly, beneath her ribcage, Alice Peel felt a sharp stab of anticipation that shocked her with its ecstatic greed.

CHAPTER FIVE

With the steady approach of summer the pack ice in the scoop of bay was slowly, grudgingly, breaking up. This morning the ice was a dirty ivory colour, glinting here and there like polished bone. The expanding streaks of water were black and pewter grey under a matching sky, and a thin veil of ice fog hung over the cliffs that formed the opposite wall of the bay. Idle flakes of snow spun in the still air, floating upwards as well as down.

Rooker replaced the engine casing of the skidoo and twisted the ignition key. The machine obligingly coughed and roared, and Valentin Petkov, the glaciologist, glanced back from where he was placing bamboo wands and marker flags out on the ice and gave a thumbs-up. The field assistant, Philip Idwal Jones, was nearby, coiling a rope. He finished it with a loop, slung it over his shoulder and trudged back through the snow.

‘Hey. Rook.’ The shout carried clearly in the silence. ‘Time for a brew?’

Rooker pulled back the cuff of his glove to check his watch. It was midday and they had been out since 8 a.m. Petkov was keen to set up his markers and take the first set
of readings. This part of his study, as Rooker understood it, was to do with comparing the speed of travel of the margins of the ice with the centre. If you could call it speed, he reflected, at the rate of millimetres per year.

Philip reached the skidoo, dropped his rope and took off his fleece cap to scratch at his spikes of black hair. He had a patchy black beard to match. Phil was only twenty-six but he had been travelling and climbing since he was seventeen. This was his third Antarctic season. As a mountain guide it was his job to assist the scientists in their fieldwork and at the same time to make sure they didn’t fall down a crevasse or off a cliff.

‘Piece of cake, I don’t think,’ he had confided to Rooker. ‘That French bird thinks she knows it all, du’n’t she?’

Rooker liked him.

‘Ta,’ Phil said now when Rooker passed him a thermos of coffee. ‘Phew. Warm, innit?’

It was, compared with a week ago, when they had first arrived. Daytime temperatures then had hovered around –23°C, with a heavy wind chill. Today it was a mild and summery –5°C.

‘D’you think Valerie’s going to take a break?’ Phil wondered, looking over at Petkov who was still zigzagging across the glacier. Phil maintained that Valentin wasn’t a name at all, just a card you sent to your girlfriend if you remembered and could be bothered, and insisted instead on Val, which he then back-formed to Valerie. No one could be less effeminate than Valentin. He had a rich bass voice and a barrel chest, and a fondness for whisky and jokes whose punchlines didn’t always survive the shift from Bulgarian into English. There were six different first languages at Kandahar Station, but English was the common tongue.

‘Dead common,’ Phil had inevitably quipped in his thick Welsh accent.

He beckoned to Valentin by waving a mug in a wide arc. It was hard to judge distances across the bland, grey-white face of the glacier. Only over to their left, where it suddenly tipped downhill and spilled towards the ice and the sea, splitting into a chaotic mass of seracs and twisted crevasses on the way, did its scale become more legible.

Phil sighed when the scientist cheerily waved back, either not understanding or not wanting to stop work.

‘Daft Bulgar. I’ll have to take it over there. Give us one of those butties, mate.’ He took the thermos and a wrapped sandwich, and headed off across the snow again.

The skidoo had been tending to stall on the way out from the base. Rooker had found and cleared a blockage in the fuel line. He sat on the machine now, leaning back against the handlebars with his feet up on the seat. When he had looked into the radio room this morning, Niki had told him that the warm and windless weather heralded a storm. Nikolai Pocius was the radio operator, a gaunt Lithuanian communications genius who had spent ten years in the Russian army. Niki was probably right, but it was hard to believe it in this moment of perfect stillness. When he closed his eyes, apart from the faint breath of cold on his face, Rooker thought he could be in a vacuum. The depth of silence was crystalline and absolute, without the smallest possibility – a certainty anywhere else in the world – that it would be shattered in the next second by a jet passing overhead or a burst of distorted music or the whine of traffic.