Sun at Midnight (27 page)

Sex had flown in and unbalanced them all. Even me, Alice thought. Here I am, a pregnant geologist who’s never done one single thing in her life – except for coming to Antarctica – without weighing and calculating all the possible eventualities, and I feel as madly turned-on as a teenager. The thought made her smile. Rooker saw the smile and raised one sardonic eyebrow at her.

It was a convivial meal. The TV crew ate normally, without paying much attention. Lewis Sullavan politely sampled everything and complimented Russell on his skills. The Kandahar people devoured every glistening morsel they could get and wiped their plates clean. Beverley hardly touched hers. She murmured something in a low voice to Rooker, who shrugged indifference.

‘I’ll drink your wine, though.’

The wine had been brought in the helicopter. It was very good, Chile’s best. In the end Jochen ate Beverley’s leftovers, his cracked lips shiny with grease in the reddish mat of his beard.

Lewis Sullavan held court, leaning back in his chair and nodding at the bottle if anyone’s glass happened to be empty. He turned the blaze of his attention on each of them in turn. He asked Alice if she would let him accompany her in the field tomorrow.

‘Certainly.’ Alice smiled. They would go up to an outcrop behind the base that she had already mapped. That was planned. Beverley had probably allotted it a space of x minutes in the diary.

‘And what about you, James? What brings you to Antarctica?’ Sullavan asked suddenly.

‘Rooker,’ Rooker said.

Richard’s forehead twitched, so that the pale vertical furrows between his eyebrows were swallowed up. He disliked Rook but he was eager for each of them to acquit themselves properly in front of Sullavan, not just for his own sake but for the team and the good of the project.

Alice thought, he’s too dutiful to be calculating. He can’t manipulate any of us, let alone Lewis or Rook.

‘Rooker,’ Sullavan repeated smoothly.

Rook drained an inch of cognac and set his glass down. He said, ‘Money. And it’s a place to be. It’s not quite the same but it’s not all that much different from any other place.’

‘I see from your CV that you are a pilot.’

‘I was.’

There was a small silence, but he didn’t elaborate.

Lewis laughed. He nudged the cognac bottle towards Rook and sank deeper in his seat, as if they were two guys in a bar settling down to an evening’s drinking and boasting. ‘You’re a bit of a maverick, aren’t you?’

Rooker didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer and Lewis only laughed more delightedly. At the same time he was studying Rooker’s face.

‘A loner, a chancer. I like that.’ He chuckled. ‘I recognise the breed.’ The implication was that Lewis himself was of the same breed and that as a man he found Rooker more to his taste than, say, a meticulous scientist. Richard smiled tightly. Everyone round the table was listening now.

‘Where are you heading next?’

‘I have no idea,’ Rooker said.

Beverley lowered her curved eyelids a fraction as she absorbed and stored the information.

Lewis rubbed the side of his mouth with the pad of his thumb. ‘I see.’

Rooker’s blank gaze held steady. I doubt it, his expression seemed to say.

Lewis hesitated, then his head swivelled. ‘Valentin, my friend. I was in Sofia last week. Is it your home town?’

The corrugations across Richard’s forehead eased. The conversation jerked and speeded up again. Rooker had let no one down, at least for now. Rooker himself only leaned across Beverley for the bottle and replenished his glass.

At midnight, Beverley politely excused herself and stood up. She headed for the women’s room, drawing ripples of longing in her wake. After she had gone the media crew unbent and began laughing noisily with Phil and Russell. Melancholy had crept up on Niki again. He rested his bony chin in one cupped hand and stared at the place that Beverley had occupied, then unfolded his skeletal height from the table and drifted away to the radio room. Lewis and Richard were discussing investment in new infrastructure for the base.

At 1 a.m. exactly Lewis consulted his watch. ‘I think we’d better call it a day. It’s another busy one tomorrow.’

The party was over, without negotiation.

Alice wasn’t ready for sleep. Her skin buzzed and prickled, and a cavalcade of images marched through her head. Remembering that Russell would be spending the night out in a tent she murmured to him that she would make a start on the washing-up.

The room emptied. Alice stacked plates, then stood at the sink and began to scrub pans. The lights in the sky above the sweep of snow and rock outside were violet and pearl and ochre. She could see the two tents pitched in a sheltered angle of rock. There was a light glowing in one of them. Rooker and Phil and Russell and Valentin would be playing a couple of hands of cards and finishing the second bottle of cognac. She guessed that Beverley Winston would be amongst the topics of conversation.

The mundane activity of scouring saucepans and the contrast with the light-bathed glacier occupied her attention. It was enough to find herself alone in the small hours, up to her wrists in greasy water and with the folds and caverns of blue ice to gaze at. She wasn’t even thinking about the baby, or the future.

A pair of hands descended on her shoulders. Instead of whirling round she hunched herself forward, protecting her belly against the metal frame of the sink.

Richard whispered in her ear, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’

Very slowly Alice turned to face him. Their faces were only an inch apart in the dimly lit room. She looked into his eyes. She could see the striations of colour in the irises, the minute dilations of the pupils. A second passed, then another. They could both hear the tiny popping sound of soap bubbles in the sink.

The dammed-up sexual tension of the evening threatened to discharge itself. Alice almost melted against him. She shivered with longing to be touched. It was a long time, weeks of being muffled under layers of protective clothes, and now she felt acutely the tiny thicknesses of fabric that separated Richard’s hands from her naked skin. But the glinting light in his eyes and the heat of his breath on her cheek made it easy to resist. There was something wrong. She sensed in him a minute deviation from normality without being able to identify what it was.

‘Thank you’, he said, so softly that she read rather than heard the words, ‘for being an ally.’

She knew what he was talking about: the antagonism between himself and Rooker that divided Kandahar.

Am I an ally?

Of course I am. Does that make me Rooker’s opponent?

‘You are quite right, of course,’ Richard went on. He took
a strand of her hair and twisted it between his fingers. She wished he wouldn’t. She remembered how he had touched her wrist in the tent at Wheeler’s Bluff. The climate and the landscape that surrounded them were so harsh, and their place in this remote world was so tenuous, that even in her wariness these small gestures of intimacy were more erotically charged than most of the sex she could remember.

‘About what?’ she managed to ask.

His eyes travelled over her face. ‘That it’s not a good idea to do this. Not while we are living in this place, while we are working together. But I wanted to kiss you just once. I’ve wanted to kiss you since the day you came in to the Polar Office.’

Her skin crawled now. The moment of awkward physical desire flipped into panic. ‘No. I’m sorry…’

He seized her round the waist, trying to pull her against him. Fear trickled icily down the back of her neck. He would
feel
her thickened waist, the flesh on her hips, her protruding stomach. He had never touched her before – except for a finger on her wrist – so how could he know the shape she had once been, or the difference now? Even so, the trickle of dismay became a flood.

She took a step sideways, feeling the cold metal of the sink against her back. A shadow fell across his face. There was the crease between his eyes again and an expression indicating that he was used to disappointment. He expected to be disappointed even before anything had happened and this told her more about his history than all the information he had given her in the tent out at the Bluff. There had been too many of the wrong expectations placed on him. All his life he had been struggling to make himself fit a predetermined shape.

She forced herself to touch his arm and smile remorsefully. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘You know, it’s being here…’

‘You’re right. I’ve already told you that much.’ He added, ‘You have a wonderful smile. Oh, Christ. That’s enough. Why don’t you leave the bloody washing-up until tomorrow?’

‘I think I will.’

At the door of the women’s room they wished each other goodnight in low voices.

‘Don’t worry,’ Richard said. He was reassuring her that he wouldn’t make demands on her or make public what had passed between them tonight.

‘Thank you.’

‘But when we get back to England?’

I’ll have a
baby
.

The leap of imagination required to take her from Kandahar to motherhood was too much. Her future broke into a scatter of tiny images. Her later pregnant self, hand to back, leaning on her heels to balance the weight in front. A baby buggy and a set of miniature socks and vests. Jo in her kitchen in Oxford, torn between exhaustion and helpless love.

‘Everything will be different, Richard.’

Her hand touched the doorknob. Kandahar was always alive with static electricity and now a shock jolted her so that she almost cried out. The door opened.

‘I’ll have to hope, then.’

‘Goodnight,’ she said and slipped inside.

In the bunk room Beverley’s perfume was everywhere. Alice undressed and lay down. Laure was breathing heavily, a small snore catching with each breath in the back of her throat. From Beverley’s bunk there was total silence.

The next day Rooker and Phil took Lewis and Alice on the skidoos up to the rock outcrop. Alice unloaded her pack and hoisted it on her back. They were only a mile from the base but she had a rope, emergency food and an insulated
bag to crawl into for shelter in case the weather came in. The sky was unbroken blue but Alice knew enough about Antarctic weather systems by now not to place any store by this.

Lewis waved the safety officers away. ‘Alice and I will be just fine. We have plenty to talk about.’

‘I’m not going to want to listen in, am I?’ Phil muttered. ‘Have you got the radio?’ he asked Alice for the second time.

She patted her pocket. ‘And I’ve tested it.’

‘Don’t want anything to happen to either of you, do we?’

‘Indeed not,’ Lewis Sullavan said expansively.

‘See you, then. Give us a call when you’re ready for a pick-up.’

The motors revved and the machines shot away, bouncing over the crests of sastrugi. Rooker hadn’t spoken at all.

Lewis turned to Alice. Even if she had had no idea who he was, she wouldn’t have mistaken him for anything but a rich and powerful man. He was
shiny
. His protective clothing was all new and of the finest quality. His skin was lightly tanned, not cruelly weather-beaten, he was clean-shaven and his hair was expensively cut. He had beautiful teeth and manicured fingernails.

‘Just show me what you normally do.’ Lewis smiled.

‘Don’t step anywhere except where I lead, will you? I’ve mapped all this section of rock and I know where the crevasses are.’

‘No ma’am,’ he said.

Alice laid out her geological hammer and compass, and opened her notebook. She planned to make a detailed survey of a section that she had only glanced at in the mapping process. Narrow sedimentary bands had been forced upwards and doubled over into fantastical folds and pleats by magmatic eruption over a hundred million years ago. Chips and
slabs of quartz and mica embedded in a finer matrix had been eroded so that the whole face of rock was patterned with serpentine swirling bands of different tones and textures to make an intricate mosaic. The outcrop was on too massive a scale to be properly compared with any human creation, but it looked like a piece of highly worked sculpture.

‘The work isn’t very interesting to watch, I’m afraid,’ Alice apologised. She drew the parameters of the section in her notebook. ‘This is a vertical section. It’s actually on a slant just here, of course, because the molten rock burst up from the earth’s core and pushed it into this series of striking folds. The older sedimentary rock now lies on top of the younger.’

She talked as she worked, fluent from countless undergraduate field courses. She was aware of Lewis standing just behind her shoulder, listening with apparent attention. She measured a sequence of layers and drew them in her notebook, then tapped out a series of samples, bagged them up and labelled them. It was comfortable in the shelter of the rocks and the sparkling air was absolutely still. She became absorbed in the work. There were traces of carbon film here that indicated fossilised fragments of plant stems and roots. Richard would be interested. She wasn’t sure how many minutes had passed before she looked round for Lewis. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the red flash of his parka, maybe twenty feet away.

Her sharp cry of warning squeezed out of her throat at the same time as his yell of alarm. As her head jerked fully round, he disappeared from view. A split second later she saw his head and upper body. His arms were akimbo, wedged against the snow. The rest of him had disappeared into a narrow veiled crevasse. His mouth was hanging open and he groaned as if he had been punched in the solar plexus.

Alice sank to her knees to bring her eyes level with his. ‘Keep still. Don’t thrash around.’

Keeping eye contact with him, she shuffled sideways on her knees to her pack and detached the ice axe from its loops. She ran through Phil’s instructions in her head. The rope was in the pack. Oh, God. She had known the crevasse was there. She should have kept him on a rope. How could anyone keep
Lewis Sullavan
tied on the end of a rope?

Don’t think about that now. Concentrate.

She uncoiled the rope, knotted a loop in the end, paid out a length and tied another knot. She passed the shaft of her ice axe through the second knot and drove the whole shaft deep into the soft snow until the pick bit into the rope knot and held it firm. She secured herself to the rope and took a self-locking carabiner off her harness loop.