Sun at Midnight (12 page)

‘Hmm. Doctoral studies, carbonate sedimentary rocks, western Turkey. Lecturer in sedimentology, University of Oxford…proposed area of study…mapping, stratigraphic survey and dating of sedimentary rock formations in the vicinity of…Yes.’ Richard looked up abruptly and his eyes held Alice’s. His gaze was unblinking. ‘Lewis is very eager to have you join the expedition.’

Cautiously, Alice nodded.

‘Perhaps you could give me your own reasons.’

She looked straight back at him. She would have to be honest. ‘The enthusiast was originally my mother. She was, is…’

‘Yes, I know who your mother is.’

Of course he did.

There was a small silence. Shoesmith was still waiting. Alice added softly, ‘I have thought about it a great deal since the suggestion was first made.’

The truth was that an entirely unexpected desire had taken hold of her.

It wasn’t to do with geological research, although her academic appetite for the new realm of Antarctic rock was beginning to grow. It wasn’t even for Margaret’s sake, although of course that was a part of it. It was much more that she wanted to push out from the secure corner of her own life, the place that her crumbled illusions about Peter had left dusty and unpopulated, and to turn disappointment into discovery.

All her knowledge of the south was second-hand, straitjacketed by book covers or seen through the tunnel of a camera lens. There was none of her own history in it, although its history surrounded her. She had been keeping her mind closed to it for years, until Margaret and Lewis
Sullavan together had opened a door. And now the very remoteness and the blank page that it would offer had begun to draw her, as forcibly as they had once repelled.

She began to dream of Antarctica, vivid dreams painted in ice colours and scoured with blizzards. She woke up from these dreams relieved to find herself in her own bed and yet impatient with the confines of ordinary life.

Beyond the shaded windows of the Polar Office lay the olive-green river, threaded by tourist boats and police launches, and the dome of St Paul’s and the busy bridges, the complicated and familiar web of London. Alice thought of the roads leading away from the centre, skeins of motorways passing the airports, the route that would take her back to Oxford, to the quiet house in Jericho where Pete no longer lived, and all the other avenues and niches of a populated world. Was going to Antarctica just running away from the overfamiliar, from the present disappointment of reality?

No one who went to the ice ever came back unchanged: Alice had heard that often enough, even from Margaret, the arch-unsentimentalist. Probably everyone who found themselves drawn south was on the run from someone, or something, and that included Richard Shoesmith. But she was running towards it too, faster and faster every day. The sound of her own footsteps pounded a drumbeat rhythm in her head.

She was ready to be changed.

Richard Shoesmith was waiting for her answer.

Alice felt her legs shaking and the palms of her hands grew damp. She crossed her ankles in the opposite direction and let her hands lie composedly in her lap, but even so she was sure he read the unscientific glitter in her eyes. She didn’t think Shoesmith missed much. ‘I want to see it for myself,’ she said.

‘Go on, please.’

Knowing that this was not the time to mention dreams of ice, or of running anywhere, she talked about European scientific co-operation, Antarctic geopolitics and the unrivalled opportunity to undertake valuable research. The words were measured, but eagerness coloured them and her voice shivered just audibly with absolute longing.

Richard Shoesmith took all of this in. His expression didn’t change as he listened to her, but some of the rigidity seemed to melt out of him.

‘It is a chance that any geologist would jump at, Dr Peel. A complete field season, automatic full funding, the opportunity to make your mark as part of a team at a brand-new station.’

‘Yes. I do appreciate that.’

He picked up a smooth ovoid rock from his desktop and meditatively turned it in his fingers. Embedded in the dark siltstone Alice could see the pale, distinct bullet shape of a Jurassic belemnite. ‘Because of the nature of our present funding, in the selection of personnel for this expedition there is an inevitable element of, how shall I put it, who you are and whom you know?’

He was looking down at the fossil, not at her.

Alice smiled before she said delicately, ‘I think we both understand that.’

Because she knew about Richard Shoesmith, just as he knew about her and her mother’s reputation.

Shoesmith was a famous name, but not by reason of Richard’s own achievements. He was a palaeontologist. He had completed his PhD at Cardiff, had done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, held a research post at Warwick and was currently Reader in Palaeontology there. She had pulled out some of his papers and read them attentively. He had done some new work on evolution and
extinction of certain cephalopods and gastropods at the end of the Cretaceous, but he didn’t have a big reputation in his field.

His grandfather, however, was Gregory Shoesmith.

As a twenty-two-year-old alpinist, poet and gentleman botanist, Gregory had been one of the youngest members of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition. As an explorer he had acquitted himself with quiet bravery and dignity, and Mount Shoesmith, the majestic peak overlooking the Beardmore Glacier, was named after him. But it was for his poem, ‘Remember This, When I Am Best Forgotten’, that he was famous. For every schoolchild of the last century it was the epitaph for the heroic age of polar exploration.

Gregory came home from the ice with what was left of Scott’s expedition and had almost immediately enlisted. He survived the entire war and was awarded the VC. He was widowed while he was still a young man, then married again in his forties. His second wife had three children and the youngest of these, a career soldier, was Richard Shoesmith’s father. As the child of a services family Richard had seen his father’s postings all over the world, but mostly he had grown up in English boarding schools.

This much Alice knew as fact. She also knew by intuition that she and Richard Shoesmith suffered in common the sun and shadow effect of their family reputations. For Lewis Sullavan it made perfect sense to have Gregory Shoesmith’s grandson leading his first expedition, just as it would to have Margaret Mather’s daughter amongst the scientists. Who you are, as Richard put it, provided them both with enviable opportunities. And the two of them had always to live without the certainty that what they did achieve was on their own merits.

Richard put down the belemnite stone but his fingers still rested on it, as if for reassurance. He considered for a
moment, then seemed to reach a decision. ‘Are you free to travel south at this short notice? Most of the members will be at Kandahar by the middle of October.’

A little more than two weeks’ time.

Alice thought quickly. ‘My mother has been very ill recently, but she’s recovering. She would be there herself if it were possible and because it isn’t she very much wants me to go in her place. Apart from my parents, I don’t have any other ties. I could be at Kandahar in a month’s time, if that would be acceptable.’

A silence fell. With his head turned to the city view of towers and cranes, and his fingers minutely caressing the stone, Richard was thinking. On the wall behind him was a framed aerial photograph of a slice of Antarctic coastline. It was a black-and-white image in which the sea was inky black and the mainland mountain peaks stood out in stark whiteness, ribbed with shadows almost as black and deep as the waters. In the fretted indentations of U-shaped bays, ice showed up in milky swirls as diaphanous as torn muslin. At such a distance the treacherous glaciers looked as innocuous as wrinkled skin on some great cooling and congealing milk pudding. Somewhere, on that peninsular margin between black water and white ice, lay Kandahar Station.

‘As I told you, Lewis is strongly in favour of your joining us. And I would be happy to accede to that.’

She thought that this cool assurance was the last word, but then he surprised her.

‘I love Antarctica with all my heart. I’ve always loved it, first the idea and then the reality. It’s the only place, the only thing I have ever known that is always more beautiful than its admirers can convey, more seductive and more dangerous than its reputation allows. You can never forget it, and it never releases its hold on you. I hope that it will come to be just as important to you.’

‘I hope so too,’ Alice said. And then she smiled. It was her wide, infrequent and startlingly brilliant smile. ‘Thank you.’

Richard coughed and turned his attention to a separate set of papers on his tidy desk. ‘However, there are a number of things you will need to do before you can definitely join us. Medical and dental check-ups, and so forth. Beverley Winston will arrange for you to be kitted out with polar gear. Everything is supplied, with the Sullavan Company logo as well as the EU flag. You will also have to do some basic survival training. The British Antarctic Survey people have kindly agreed to provide that for our UK members, in the spirit of European unity and cooperation.’ He smiled drily.

‘At such short notice you may not have the opportunity to meet the other members of the expedition together, or even individually, before we all reach Kandahar. We’re a farflung group, geographically speaking. Which is part of the idea, of course – not to gather a little coterie of chums who were all at Cambridge together.’

Richard Shoesmith didn’t belong to any such coterie, Alice understood. Nor did Lewis Sullavan.

‘We shall be a full-season core of just ten people in all. Six scientists, including yourself, and four support staff.’

She read the list of names that he passed across the desk to her.

Eight people she didn’t yet know, with whom she would spend five months in a hut perched on the white margin at the distant end of the earth. Outside, in London, toy boats were plying their way up and down the river, and taxis were being hailed to take businessmen to lunch.

‘Six nationalities,’ Richard said. ‘Seven, if you count Welsh. This is not a huge Antarctic research station like McMurdo or even Rothera. We shall be pioneers on an old base and
we’ll set out with no rules except safety regulations. We are there to help one another and to cooperate in everything from science to international understanding to cleaning the base kitchen. If there is a job that needs to be done, any job whatsoever, you will be expected to help out with it.’

A slow flush darkened Richard’s already ruddy cheeks. He was moved by the thought of this, of their tightly knit and multinational group working together outside the common conventions, and Alice found that she was touched in response.

‘You know your polar history? Of course you do. You know that Amundsen’s bid for the Pole was for Norway’s sake. It was a matter of national ambition and pride. Whereas Scott wanted the Pole, of course, but the real reason for his expeditions, the ideal that he and his team all fought and risked their lives for, was scientific exploration and discovery. We shall also be there for science’s sake.’

She understood that Richard Shoesmith was a scientist through and through. He would be a meticulous, painstaking investigator but he almost certainly wouldn’t write poetry passionate enough to inspire two generations, as his gentleman-botanist grandfather had done. Alice’s sympathy and liking for him grew.

‘Yes,’ she said.

The meeting was drawing to a close. They talked for a few more minutes about the practicalities of preparation and travel, then Alice stood up and Richard walked with her to the door. They were shaking hands when he said, ‘Are you free for lunch?’

It was twenty minutes past twelve and she had arranged to meet Becky at one o’clock in a bar in Clerkenwell. ‘I’m sorry. I’m on my way to see a friend.’

He didn’t have to ask her to lunch, it wasn’t a part of the vetting process. He was asking because he wanted to.
They recognised each other. She smiled at him again.

‘Of course. Well, then, good luck with your medicals and so forth. We’ll speak.’

‘Yes. Thank you for asking me to join the expedition. I’m looking forward to it.’

As their eyes met for the last time they acknowledged this for a comical understatement.

Alice sailed down in the bubble lift, crossed the grandiose foyer and walked out into the cloudy morning. There was the smell of river and the dampness of autumn in the air. The faces of people walking towards her had acquired extra definition, she could read the words on the sides of buses crawling over Blackfriars Bridge. All her senses were heightened and sharpened with the intensity of anticipation. She had been insulated by her own circumspection, but now she was going into the unknown.

Becky was waiting. Her legs were hooked round a bar stool made of tortured metal, there was a drink on the table beside her and her head was bent over the
Evening Standard
. Wings of smooth hair swung forward to curtain her face and then she looked up and saw Alice. ‘How did it go? No, I can see. You’re the polar queen. You’re really going? My God, Al, you
are
. C’mon, let’s drink to it.’

Alice laughed. She couldn’t quite catch her breath. ‘I’m going,’ she said faintly. ‘I hardly know how it’s happened, but I am.’

‘How long?’

‘Five months. The summer field season. I’ll be leaving at the end of October and I’ll be back in March.’

A drink materialised beside her. A long glass, ice, jaunty coloured straw. She took a long suck and almost choked with the intensity of the taste. Alcohol immediately fumed in her head.

Becky was wearing a khaki combat top with pockets and buttons and epaulettes, but the fabric was contradictory slippery satin. The way the light fell on it and reflected different sumptuous colours caught Alice’s eye. Pete used to talk about colour, she remembered, as if it were food or sex.

Look at this carmine, look at this crocus-yellow. Don’t you want to eat it? Don’t you want to
lick
it?